The Owl Lover
by EPotterME
Summary: While in an art gallery, Anna happens upon the story of a young girl, Isolde, destined to be the leader of her people. When Isolde meets the man of her dreams, she embraces an idyllic life, complete with happily ever after. But he cannot forever.
1. Chapter 1

Anna gazed at the statue in complete awe of every line, fascinated by the smooth flawlessness of every dip and slope. She admired the delicate hands of this ageless young woman, small and perfect down to the ragged nubs of her nails. A few strips of stone cloth, sultry and impossible for its texture and inkiness, wrapped her breasts and hips, affording her the dignity of modesty.

She walked around in silence, gazing at the smooth hollows behind the nameless girl's knees, the perfect forms of her ankles and toes, the exquisite frenzied splay of hair plastered to her ivory shoulders and back.

The statue, lifelike as it was, neither appreciated nor objected to the attention; she simply sat quietly on the pedestal, legs arranged loosely beneath her, her arms extended gracefully into empty space as though waiting for something to alight upon her.

The mechanics of this piece are astounding, Anna thought. The support structure is completely wrong and the balance is off. By rights, this statue should have collapsed beneath its own weight years ago. And...

She breathed in heavily, marveling once more at its seamless perfection.

It just wasn't possible.

Above the young woman, just beyond the reach of those all-too-alive hands hover the perfect effigy of an owl. It hung suspended in the air, without benefit of strings or wires or any support whatsoever from the statue's substantial base.

It simply floated, unassuming, in the dim gallery.

Anna shook her head, once again astounded by the feat of artistic engineering used to deliver the appearance of flight. She paused, her arm half extended. Mustn't touch, she reminded herself, although she felt an overwhelming urge to reach out and stroke the delicate pinfeathers, to sift the owl's downy breast. She dropped her eyes to the statue's base, concentrating on the words. The signage, etched in a plaque of burnished gold, read simply:

"The Owl Lover"

No background, no artist, no date. Only this.

The scene held a moment of unequivocal sadness; forever in flight, forever beyond her grasp, the owl took silent and stony wing to escape his heartsick follower's clutches. It reminded her of Bernini's Daphne and Apollo, the pursuer and the pursued, with love always just out of reach.

How many times had Anna seen this masterpiece, so stunning in its simplicity, yet fathomless as the dark seas of time itself? She always came back, drawn once again by the promise of an undiscovered detail; of a wrinkle or an expression she might have missed the last time. She was never disappointed. Today she discovered something new, some small bit of trivia others might dismiss as foolish or insignificant.

Tears, Tiny stone tear-tracks streaked the perfect alabaster whiteness of her cheeks.

The gallery was deserted today, except for the occasional security guard making his rounds every hour or so. Outside, the day had fallen into a sunset blue, still too beautiful to hole up in a windowless brick building filled with pieces of the long-dead past. No one in their right mind would have given up a perfectly good Friday night for the dim halls of a public art gallery.

No one but Anna, of course.

She couldn't stay home. Her presence alone enlisted her for babysitting duty, and she had much better things to do with her time than changing the twins' diapers and mixing formula. Anyway, that was their mother's job. It was just fine with Anna that Mom was too busy taking care of the rest of the family to notice how frequently she was gone these days. It saved Anna the trouble of explaining herself all the time.

She sat down on the hardwood floor and rested her head on the statue's base. A curious chill emanated from the stone, cooling her skin even from a foot away or more. She reached out to touch the statue's smooth white ankle, and again stopped herself.

She wasn't sure why she felt so drawn to this particular piece. It wasn't the most popular work of art in the museum, or the most beautiful. In fact, the curator's decision to keep it in this badly lit corner was based in part upon the public's request for more people-friendly works. More Anne Geddes, More Andrew Wyeth, More Norman Rockwell. The weeping lady and her owl lover didn't exactly fit the category of feel-good art.

Nonetheless, "The Owl Lover" blew them all out of the water. None of the works by those artists held half the curiosity, half the wonder and mystery of this single piece. Half its attraction, she supposed, was the mystery surrounding its acquisition. She had asked one of the curators about its purchase only to find an anonymous benefactor had donated it. Poking and prodding hadn't helped to get more information out of her, but the curator did mention that he was an older gentleman, continental to the core, whose health had failed rapidly in the past few years. He had simply wanted to see the prize of his collection housed where it might be appreciated rather than sold anonymously at some estate auction.

She could see where this might be the prize of his collection. Every inch was perfect, wrought in exquisite detail, right to the soul in those outstretched hands. The artist might have just poured liquid stone over the moment to seal it in, and then set it upon a base and called it 'art.'

A sweet, dark odor assailed her nostrils and she blinked her eyes, grown large in the dim, dusty light. A pleasant odor, and familiar...dusky, as though from flowers cultivated at night. It smelled like violets in late summer, the kind that used to spring up in the shade behind her Aunt Sarah's garage.

"It's like a little piece of forever, isn't it?"

Anna scrambled up quickly at the sound of the man's voice. She squinted in the dim light to see a thin, elderly man hobbling toward her, his slight weight pitched forward over a walker. He seemed spry enough, but she didn't doubt he needed that extra little bit of help to get around.

"Didn't mean to frighten you, my dear," he soothed, noting the startled flush in Anna's cheeks. "I'll leave if you'd like."

"N-no," Anna stuttered, embarrassed. "No, I was just-"

"Doesn't matter," the old man said, dismissing her explanation. He jerked his chin towards the statue. "She's beautiful, isn't she? That little girl in there's got some stories to tell. I've been listening for years."

"'She' is a statue," Anna snapped. Her heart still pounded at the shock of discovering she wasn't alone. "I doubt it has a whole lot to say."

He gave Anna a pitying smile. He didn't have so many furrows in his forehead, she noticed, as a long mottled scar that rippled when he smiled.

"Everything has a story, if you'll only hear it," he explained. "It won't be so obvious at first. You'll come back again and again - the way you keep coming back to this museum, for example..."

"How do you know that?" she demanded, eyeing him, then the door, cautiously.

He chuckled, dismissing the question. "You've fooled yourself into thinking it's the cleverness in the design or the beauty of the piece that brings you back, but it isn't. It's the stories. She won't let go of you until you've heard them all." The old man appreciated Anna bewilderment.

"Something in you knows they're there - that's why you keep coming back.

But you've never really listened for them, have you? You should, you know."

"And why should I?"

"Because insomnia is only one agent of unfinished business, He coughed dryly, still smiling as his face turned beet-purple. Anna winced at the rattle in his chest. It sounded like old bones tumbling around in a hollow gourd.

He looked up again, his eyes shining like pale, washed-out jewels. He looked as though he hadn't slept well for a very long time. He cast her sad, faded smile. "I'm older than dust and I still can't keep away."

"I thought you said it let go after you've heard what it has to say," Anna challenged.

"That's the curse of it. If you stayed here forever, you'd never hear it all."

He drifted in reminiscence, his eyes glittering like mad stones: "I heard them years ago, but it was a different time. A different place, they've been with me every moment since. That's how she came about, you know."

He reached out and touched a cold white fingertip, his hand trembling against the dead stone. He stared at his hands, blotchy and purple with age beneath the golden display lights. "There were stories, so many stories in my head, and I needed a face, lips, someone to tell them..."

The smell of violets rose up in a wave, and Anna's eyes watered painfully.

"SHHHH!" He turned to Anna, his hands white-knuckled and gripping the walker fiercely. "Can't you hear it? She's whispering now! Psssssst...pssssssst...oh can't you hear it?"

Anna stepped back until her knees were against the base. One more step and she'd be forced to sit down. Her eyes darted this way and that in search of an escape.

Calm down, Lee, she scolded herself. What's he goanna do? Chase you down and hit you with his walker?

"They follow me," he explained loudly, as though trying to make himself heard over another voice. "They won't let me be! They'll never just let me be..." His old face cracked with a look bordering on desperate. "You think I'm crazy, don't you? I can see it in your eyes. I'm old, but I'm certainly not blind!"

"I didn't say you were crazy," Anna protested. I didn't say you were sane either, she added silently, looking around, listening for a security guard.

He turned the walker around slowly, peering back at her with stony, desolate eyes. "Go ahead and listen," he dared. "Really listen. Listen to the air, to the dust motes swimming' around the lights, to the sound of your own breath. If you listen hard enough, you'll hear them too." He pitched over, propelling the walker forward and out the door. "Then we'll see who's crazy."

"Wait!" Anna called.

The old man stopped shakily, but didn't turn around.

"Where did you see it before? The statue, I mean." He dropped his head as his shoulders began to tremble. The reek of violets was almost overwhelming.

"Only a block of stone when I began, but she knew the shape she wanted to take!" The words tumbled down in a waterfall, stumbling and pouring like a secret kept too long. "The whispering, oh god the whispering...she wouldn't stop! She wouldn't let me forget her face! She knew what it would do to me to see her again, exactly as she was-"

"You...you made this?" Anna looked at his gnarled, twisted-root fingers.

Maybe once he could have created something like this, but she doubted he could hold a fork and spoon these days, much less a hammer and chisel.

"She's yours?"

Anna could almost hear the strange, bitter smile settle on his lips. "Oh yes, I made her," he confessed. "I made her into what she is now. But she never belonged to me," he added quickly. "Not even for a moment."

And then he was gone, the sound of his walker faded beyond the gallery walls.

Anna sat down near the statue's base, away from the door where no one could see her and raise questions as they walked by.

Stupid, she thought, but rested her head upon the base anyway and closed her eyes. The nearly inaudible hum of the overhead lights sliced the room's silence, but the statue itself remained still and mute, as she had known it would.

"It's like a little piece of forever, isn't it?"

She blocked out his trembling voice, and tried to find some comfort in the statue's cool stoicism and sense of always. She had not truly meant to fall asleep, but sleep she did, and heavily. When she dreamed, she dreamed of dark days and creatures that might never be again.

She forced open her eyes some time later to blurry, formless shapes and an unsettling sense of urgency. It was all she could do to keep her eyelids from snapping closed again. She felt dazed and weak, as though she'd come down with the flu, and when she tried to sit up, the room whirled around her, rising in a mammoth wave to overtake her.

No, it told her, and urged her to lower her head back down to the cool, white base. You're much better off right here.

The overhead lights snapped off, leaving only the dim golden glow of the display light for illumination. For the art's sake, no windows were present in the galleries. It might have been brightest noonday out, or the middle of the night.

She found she didn't much care.

Adding to this curious sense of enclosure, she could not hear a single sound outside her head - even the familiar tap-tap of the guards' footsteps was not to be heard.

...but whispering, whispering everywhere devoured the silence...


	2. Chapter 2

Owls and humans have never been friends.

You knew this from the start, when man spread like a plague through the

Valley of Lo, burning dryads with their trees and forcing the faeries, Nymphs and fauns that once wallowed carelessly in the valley glades to Near-extinction.

You knew this from the first time an owl screamed in the night, searching for its mate and hearing only its own tortured cries in answer. For as horrible, as heinous as the humans' crimes against the old races were, none compared to the slaughter of the owls.

Humans wiped out entire clans of them, using their eggs and flesh for food, their feathers for stuffing pillows and mattresses, and their sturdy beaks and talons and bones for fashioning tools and decorations and flutes. By the time the last owl fled the valley of Lo for Mount Ornithon, their numbers had been so violently depleted that the remaining owls feared the coming winter might eradicate them completely.

It took time for their numbers to build again, but they did, and steadily.

Season after season, their nests teemed with life, spilling the new generation forth and keeping the memories of old deeds hot and fresh. Vengeance, they agreed, must be something swift and lasting, and not soon forgotten.

Their course decided, the owls of Lo took wing.

Her windows had been open, as most windows in Lo were when the winds grew warm and the rains seemed far away. She cried and whimpered as she was put down for the night, but this was nothing unusual.

It began almost as soon as the door clicked shut, the instant the knob completed its turn. Adrienne's shadow had not yet even moved from beneath the door.

The baby stopped crying.

Adrienne stopped cold, her maternal alarm raised by the silence beyond the door. But she could not have heard her daughter's tiny gasp of surprise, nor could she have seen the shadow of waiting wings once the door had closed behind her. She cautioned inside once more, chiding herself for such a silly concern...

The room had become very cold, in spite of the evening's warmth. The baby usually kicked her blankets away, but tonight she'd not yet had the opportunity to do so.

Adrienne staggered back.

"Theresa," she whispered, and gap there in horror at the empty crib.

A new plague had come to Lo, a plague fueled by memories of spilled blood and burgeoning life stolen from violated nests.

On this moonless summer night, a parliament of owls thick enough to blacken the noontime sun settled over the human village, screeching from their avian souls, and lifted the fleshy human babies away in their sharp claws.

The screeching of owls filled the inky sky, coupling with the maddening screams of the human children. Babies howled in the darkness, nearly drowned out by the frantic cries of mothers young and old. Every mother and father in the village left their elder children with grandmothers and grandfathers and congregated at the town center, weapons in hand, screaming their challenges in a host of raw and shrieking voices.

The owls' answer fell from the sky, as swift and lasting as any justice the humans could devise.

One of the human babies - the Chancellor's tiny daughter Theresa, judging from the peach-shaped birthmark on what remained of her torso - tumbled into the dust with a wet crunch, released from the calculating talons of an owl elder. With a nerve-splitting shriek, the owl retreated into the darkness, its warning delivered.

The owls' message precluded any further discussion of revenge for the moment. The men and women of Lo dared go no further for fear that their own children had met the same end. It is a universal truth that no parent should ever outlive a child, but to see that child's death, to know that its passing had been anything but quick and peaceful...

In desperation, they turned to the Chancellor for guidance.

"Chancellor."

He turned from the sight of his daughter, from the nightmare of his wife's tortured sobs, and listened carefully to the words of the old soothsayer. Her wrinkled face wore another ten years tonight as she spat upon the ground and tossed a cup of owl bones as easily as parlor dice.

"Tell me, Hylah. Tell me what has been foretold."

Her heart was heavy with grief for the Chancellor's baby girl as she poked and stirred at the bones for omens. After an age of muttering and strange incantations, the old woman uttered their pronouncement.

The Chancellor gathered his people and with a numb spirit, told them the old soothsayer's words. In spite of his constituents' cries for war; in spite of his heart's demand for expiation; even in spite of his wife's bitter, heartrending tears, the human Chancellor - a wise man, now colorless and distraught - declared that there would be no more bloodshed.

The crowd rose up, driven to madness by the apathy of their leader, but he held his trembling hands above them until they were silent, and spoke to each and all.

"The soothsayer tells me the owls have taken blood for blood," he began, hardly able to keep his eyes from the sight of his baby daughter sprawled in the dirt like some strange carrion. "She tells me that the only payment for death is more death."

"Blood will have blood!" someone screamed, and every voice lifted in agreement. "Let us destroy every last one of them!"

"ENOUGH!" The Chancellor boomed, and a stunned silence fell upon the people of Lo. "Would you draw out this madness until we are all dead? Shall we return the strike and doom ourselves to a war between species? You are my people, and your words have always guided my hands, but mark well! None of us - not I and not one among us! - has the right to condemn our nation for this loss, no matter how great."

The crowd protested violently; grieving mothers screamed out their anguish beneath a deaf sky. Some cried "traitor"; still others called for the Chancellor's death. But not one among them had the courage to take the Chancellor down.

"We have all lost our children, yet we know only the fate of one. Your children may still be alive and well. But mine..." he trailed off, and was surprised to feel his wife's hand clenching his shoulder, using him to support herself.

"This ends here, tonight, with the burial of my daughter Theresa," he declared, and there was no argument to be heard. Lo's people were of good stock, mostly, and bowed to the wise words of the Chancellor.

Some, of course, did not.

Those few who stormed up the mountain bearing torches and blades and clubs regretted it soon after. One or two overzealous fathers - unaccustomed to the dark lands beyond lost their sight when sharp beaks punctured their eyes as easily as warm grapes in the nighttime mist. Still another foolish grieving mother stumbled back to town with a host of deep gashes on her face and neck, marked by the same talons that had spirited her child away only hours before.

"Join me now," the Chancellor implored those who could still bear to listen. "Pay your respects to the child who in time would have taken my place as your Chancellor. Together we will mourn our losses and find peace in our neighbors during this difficult time.

"But hear me now," he proclaimed, his eyes flashing in the torchlight. "As of this moment, no owl, not a single one of those winged devils, shall ever again pass through the gates of Lo."

In the shadows beyond torchlight's reach, a single pure black owl blinked in agreement and launched itself into the moonless night to deliver the proclamation to its kin.


	3. Chapter 3

Old wounds become tough in time, but never heal without a scar. Even broken bones grow thick and horny with newer, stronger bone, fortifying the weakness.

So for a thousand years, no more owls were slaughtered, and no more children were stolen from their beds. But fierce animosity remained, burning stronger with every passing generation.

The humans' hatred for all things owlish became ritual, as commonplace as grass or sunset. 'Sleep, or the owls will carry you away with them!' was a threat used to draw wails of terror from sleep-stubborn children.

But the thin line between myth and history did not blur in Lo, as it often will when memory fades. In fact, the children of Lo grew up feeling the losses of their parents' parents and earlier, as if the pain had been their own. The Chancellor - and those after him - promoted this blood-rage actively; it was best, they argued, that the people remember that dark and childless age, lest the owls return to Lo and destroy the humans grown soft and lazy in ignorant contentment.

Personal vendetta, of course, had nothing to do with it. Each successive Chancellor stroked and coddled the people's fear and hatred of the owls, tuning their grief and fear to a fine pitch. Each year on the anniversary of their greatest loss, the Chancellor would declare a great festival in the Agris, at the heart of Lo where the stone monument to a child gave constant, silent reinforcement to their traditions. The crowning glory of this evening of revels was an enormous bonfire, which some claimed could be seen from the very top of Mount Ornithon (being the home of the owls, however, no one had ever dared to affirm or negate this claim). Straw owls, paper owls, crude wood-carved owls, owls fashioned of sticks and bits of string...all fed the great bonfire which might take two or three days to burn out completely.

Even the current Chancellor's Isolde - her only daughter and the pride of her later years - would soon dance around the fire with the other maidens in the smoky midnight, throwing hawk feathers into the great burning mass.

The Chancellor herself looked upon these things and smiled, thinking the world a perfect place indeed.

In remembrance of the Chancellor's words, it should come as no surprise that not a single owl had been seen in the valley for nearly a thousand years. Outside of the Mortalbian Tapestries, owls existed here only in dreams, dark and shadowy images of creatures that may never have been at all. Any scholar might tell you of the rare bit of bone or the broken piece

of talon unearthed in the latest dig (fully funded, of course, by the Lo Archaeological Society), but these were only speculations. They might just as easily have belonged to a turtledove or a falcon. The Chancellor dipped into the treasury when necessary and further funded their excavations to keep them busy and happy, and to remind them that they were not just chasing unicorns.

The Chancellor's temple sat at the highest point in the valley, flanked on all sides by magnificent rolling green hills and impossibly fresh blue waters. If the city itself was a focal point of trade and mercantilism, the temple was the center of cultural and intellectual life. If entertainment was your pleasure, you could find it easily within the fortified walls of the temple. Perhaps in one of the fourteen theaters presenting round-the-clock works by only the stars of human literary culture.

I have heard that "Demons of the Trees" and "An Owl at Hell's Gate" are wonderful productions.

A lover of the dance? Choose to pass your nights in hedonistic splendor with nobles and commoners alike throughout twelve gilded ballrooms, each more magnificent and opulent than the last.

If these pursuits strike you as too frivolous, you might find any of the eight libraries more to your pleasure, filled to brimming with scholars and scientists at all hours of the day and night. You will find here the complete records of the owls' invasion on that tragic night so long ago, including woodcarvings and detailed eyewitness accounts. If you choose this path, you will almost certainly want to take a moment to visit the Hall of

Music, from whence might be heard the gentle strains of "The Hunter's Symphony", a favorite among the nobility.

But no visit to the temple would be complete without perusing the Great Hall's Mortalbian Tapestries, all woven by tiny hands from spider silk and faerie hair. Each and every tapestry depicted an owl's gruesome death, made stylish and euphemistic by the artistry involved in its production.

Beyond the temple, the valley itself was lush and overgrown, green with the heady scents of rainwater and earth, often intolerable in the warm seasons for the perfume of rare violets, which grew best in dark and secret places.

It was a world all its own, built from a small settlement into a thriving metropolis, a center of commerce and communion. The humans lived a good life here, unmolested for the most part by illness and hard times. The sun never shone too hot and all the rains were sweet and gentle. One might almost have forgotten Lo's desperate and childless days, if not for the

Chancellors.

But still it was a rich world, right on the edge of paradise. In the fall of this year, during the harvest season when the fields beyond the mountains swayed like golden bodies in the cool wind, a host of strangers numbering one hundred, a few more or less, stepped down from the heights of Mount Ornithon. Their bodies were light and slender, their muscles lithe and sinuous as wings, as though any moment might find them leaving the sullen earth behind for an infinite expanse of blue sky. They were not a tall people - the tallest among them was just short of six feet

- but startling in their singularity. Their features were all similar,

suggesting the possibility of blood kinship: sharp, aquiline noses, chiseled features, and pale dust-colored hair. Their eyes betrayed them almost immediately, for each and every Stranger had one eye the color of sticky-sweet honey, and one the icy blue pallor of winter sky.

The inhabitants of Lo were a southern people, dark-eyed and stocky, built for labor and toil, and knew immediately that strangers had come to walk among them. As self-proclaimed 'enlightened' people, they thought little of the Strangers, as they came to be called in time, preferring to let well enough alone. Provided they made no trouble and learned to live and work as they did, of course. And if they were only visiting, well, that was even better. For although they had no objections to new blood, neither had they tolerance for layabouts and vagrants.

These strange new peoples integrated themselves almost seamlessly into the clockwork of Lo society, joining in their revels and sorrows, acquiring positions as seamstresses, smiths and carpenters. More than one gold-and-cobalt-eyed youth left a trail of broken hearts, casting a pall of love sickness over those foolish enough to believe themselves worthy of their passions. Still others married the dark-eyed youth of Lo and soon proved evidence of their happy unions - within six months, bellies began to

swell proudly with children of two worlds. Only Mari knew that something was terribly wrong.

She knew what she had seen the day the Strangers came down from the mountain. They had not struggled down with hooks and ropes, fallen and skinned their knees and backsides on the rough mountainside. Oh, no...

They had flown down on silky wings, each and every one of them. She watched in silent terror as their bodies softened and grew, as downy feathers withdrew into their pale smooth skin. She watched without breathing as their wood-hard beaks - curved beaks that might rip a person's eyes from their sockets - shortened and rounded into a true human nose and full, soft human lips. One, a male and apparently their lieutenant, directed six of his charges to move aside a fallen boulder, revealing a deep recess in the stone. Naked, he stepped in and out of the darkness, each time carrying piles of pilfered clothing, which they donned in silence before making the long way to town.

The people of Lo laughed at her in the tavern when she told them about the beautiful creatures which looked human, but weren't. They spat at her and drove her into the streets, daring her to set foot inside again carrying such foolish stories.

But she wasn't crazy - she wasn't! Perhaps she was only a washerwoman and perhaps she was well on in years, but nowhere near senile!

"You'll believe when sorrow comes to us all!" she cried, retreating into her simple thatched-roof cottage by the clear blue lake. "You'll believe when it's too late!"

They shook their heads and slipped into their drinks, glad to be rid of the screaming wench. Foolish woman, to come in here with a story like that!

Next thing you know, she'll be taking it to the Chancellor, and she won't be so patient as the other townsfolk. She's proven in the past that she has no tolerance for people who cry 'owl'. At least one unmarked grave offered testament to that fact.


	4. Chapter 4

Lo watched the passage of years with stoic eyes, dreaming of summer as winter blanketed the ground with feathery white powder. Spring brought rain and the hope of renewal; summer's heat nurtured fond recollections of winter snow once, then again. But now Festival's hour had at last come around again, and young girls once more donned their best, tying ribbons at their waists and plaiting love knots through their long dark tresses. Young, earnest males washed themselves well and scraped the hair from their cheeks until the skin shone red and shiny, and all this after gathering wood enough to build the skeleton of tonight's bonfire.

Isolde hummed a quiet, somber tune as the handmaid laced her pale green-and-blue gown up the back, drawing the lacings tight. Now and again she reminded her nurse that this was her first real Festival, and she wanted to suffer comfortably.

"Every young man there will want to dance with you tonight," Genny encouraged, trying - in Isolde's estimation - far too hard to sound cheerful.

"I'll probably dance alone," she lamented, her heart blue and sinking deeper with every syllable. "Worse, I'll have to dance with Cullen Marst, and then I'll wish I WAS dancing alone." She gasped sharply as the maid tightened the breath out of her. "Easy, Genny," she cautioned. "Don't snap a rib."

Genny murmured a grudging apology and repaired the damage, tugging at the snug bodice. "Don't be so down," she encouraged, giving Isolde a heartfelt pat on the shoulder. "Cullen Marst is a good man. A little long in the tooth, maybe - "

"Genny, if age were measured in teeth, the man would have tusks."

"Now, Iffy, don't be like that. Your mother wouldn't care to hear you speak of him that way. He's the most likely choice for a husband for you, considering his rank and...substance."

"His wealth doesn't make him any less loathsome. He frightens me, the way he's always looking at me as if I'm the last bit of meat on his plate." Genny clucked and pulled the laces until Isolde whistled when she breathed.

"No need to worry about that right now. Until you're ready to make yourself available to suitors, you're still a child. It's up to you to decide when you're ready. Or your mother," she added quietly.

"If it were up to me, I'd never make myself available. I'd rather wait until I'm old and no one will even consider me." Or, she thought silently, until Cullen Marst is dead and far from my bed.

"I think you're worrying too much," Genny soothed, and loosened the laces a hair. "Everything will work out in the end. For good or ill, it always does. You'll see. You've no need to worry."

But worry she did, and more and more frequently as of late. The past two summers had brought extraordinary changes for her, both in mind and body. After her first bleeding -and a candid conversation with Genny about blood and what comes after - she awakened most nights covered in sweat, flushed from impossible dreams of flesh on fire and faceless, mint-cool kisses that soothed the ache in her loins.

Burning, yes, but churning too, shifting in ways she had never imagined. Her gowns had to be refitted to meet her blooming breasts, and lengthened to accommodate her legs, so suddenly long and coltish. Her feet felt graceful as flagstones, so often did she trip over them, and her hands and fingers dangled like awkward flowers on the thick stems of her wrists. She wept for her body, once so slim and flat and uncomplicated, and chewed her nails ragged from the moment her mother had first mentioned the word 'marriage.' Her worries compounded when the Chancellor used the word in combination with the name 'Cullen Marst.'

That he'd had his eye on her since she was barely out of diapers troubled her sleep. That he was a professional widower - five times over! - gave her some cause for concern. That he was forty years older than her set her teeth to chattering and made her wish she could disappear into a speck of dust.

It wasn't so much the idea of marriage that bothered her. It was the idea that she could not choose her own companion, that her mother would make the decision for her and base the choice not on compatibility and affection, but on wealth and resources, that made the prospect such a nightmare. Certainly she could voice her desire for one mate over another, but in truth she had what amounted to a token say in the matter.

Wasn't it just better to remain a child? All the years of days spent alone in study and preparation for the Chancellorship had never bothered her so much as they did now. It was a painful decision she'd made to remain unavailable; she turned away love though loneliness gnawed at her heart, leaving it jagged and aching. She craved attention and companionship, but had only stern-faced maids and tutors to turn to. Her father was a dear creature, but was so occupied by his own interests that he seldom had more than a word or two for her. He spent his time in the company of wine and books, mostly searching and researching the events of their history for some revelation that would probably never come.

And then there was her mother, Chancellor Tamlyn. The Chancellor was a tall, stout woman with a dark and mannish face who had given her only daughter life, but little more than that. Isolde had inherited neither her mother's stature nor her hardiness, but she had managed to glean some modicum of the Chancellor's stubborn will and make it her own. Chancellor Tamlyn often remarked on her daughter's willfulness with pride, but the truth was that even she did not know her own child. She could not know how this small creature so unlike herself had spent hour after hour in solitude since childhood, dreaming of days when she might surround herself with people who wanted only to laugh and play and love.

Paradise though it may have seemed to those whose backs bent and stooped from years of working the fields, Isolde's world was a cold one, shaped and fashioned by the necessity of order. She had lived her entire life thus far in preparation of serving her people well, and she could see with the tunnel vision of the hopeless how her life would progress from here. She would marry a man she did not love, then bear a child of her own to be raised by others in the desperate solitude of a morose library. She herself would die an old woman, attending Festival year after year and smiling an empty, unfeeling smile until the maids came to wake her one morning only to find her cold and stiff beneath her lavish bedclothes. It would have been more than she could bear, had it not always been this way.

"Turn around, love," Genny prodded, turning her to face the window. "I'm on the last row of laces now." She sighed, flexing her fingers, and smoothed Isolde's raven-blue hair down her back. "This gown is much better than that plain brown thing." She wrinkled her nose at an austere daily-dress crumpled on the bed. She looked upon the silk aqua-and-seafoam gown Isolde wore with a soft smile. "You look like the sea at sunset in this one."

Wonderful, Isolde thought, and rolled her eyes. She didn't need frills and frou-frou, lace and ribbons. Nor did she desire them. She felt all the better when she looked plain and unadorned - the more childish, the better. And as long as she remained a child in the eyes of her people, she would not have to suffer a life without choice.

Though slight and pretty as she was, she worried often in her quiet and confidential hours that she was ugly and undesirable, for no man save Cullen Marst had ever dared so much as look at her. She was far too unworldly to believe that her mother's role as Chancellor might intimidate any would-be suitors, but lately she had come to suspect differently.

Perhaps her eyes were not two black lumps of coal, nor her skin sallow and imperfect; perhaps young men did not avert their eyes at the sight of her face because they found her unattractive. Maybe the other girls avoided her not because she was homely, but because the imminence of the Chancellorship hung about her like a steel curtain, forever separating *her* from *them*... As I said, Isolde was a young thing, and she worried excessively as young girls often will. But all such thoughts ended when she peered out from the casement window and down onto the Agris.

He stood below, staring up at the casement as though he had been waiting for this moment his entire life. She could not see how his lips had parted, how his heart beat so frantically that the shirt against his chest vibrated with its palpitations.

She could not see these things, but she could feel them. He was beautiful, as all the Strangers were; silken skin, fine pale hair, the most exquisite eyes. But this one had a presence that dared defiance, the sturdy calm of a master sailor who has faced a hundred storms at sea and knows that a hundred more will make no difference in the grand scheme of things.

When he smiled, she ripped her eyes from his face and turned away quickly, nearly knocking Genny from her task.

"Isolde!"

Uh-oh, she thought, and turned to face the damage.

Genny held up the severed ends of the laces. "Look what you've done! Now we'll have to start again!"

She hardly felt Genny's consternation for her own anxiety. Her heart pounded like a hail of stones as she turned back to the window to see him again. There was no one down there now, no one save an old washerwoman, stumbling and half-crazed, mumbling urgently to herself.

Just that quickly, he had vanished.

Isolde's heart sank.

"I'll get new lacings," Genny clucked, and shuffled off.

Isolde felt a distant pang of guilt; Genny was no young thing, and her knotted hands were probably aching from the ruined task. Now because of Isolde's clumsiness, she had to start all over again.

But it wasn't for the sake of Genny's sad, twisted hands that Isolde made her decision. The image of the Stranger's smooth white face still floated behind her eyes, cool and soft as the first rains of spring. It was this face she imagined as she shrugged the gown from her shoulders and onto the plush carpet beneath her feet.

"Got them!" Genny announced, trouncing into the room in a fluff of satisfaction. Thin silk laces trailed from her fingers like puppet strings.

She stopped when she saw Isolde's thoughtful expression, and was about to direct the child to cover herself when Isolde at last spoke in a slow and dreamy voice.

"I'd like to wear the white one tonight."

Genny quirked an eyebrow at her and the laces fell, strands of deep green gossamer drifting to the floor. "But....white is for waiting and wanting, Iffy. It's for maidens in search of husbands! You said yourself-"

She held herself straight and defiant, indicating that she was not about to argue. "I know what I said. The white gown, if you please."

Genny sighed, making her displeasure known as she plodded across the room to the wardrobe. "You've not even discussed it with the Chancellor! Your mother's going to have puppies when she sees you, if you don't mind me saying so..."

"I do mind."

"And what about Cullen Marst?" Genny pleaded, her face gone white as the gown she carried over to Isolde. "You know what will happen if you catch his eye, in this dress! You'll be just as good as wed..."

"That's enough, Genny," she interjected in her mother's voice, and not another word was said on the matter.

Let them see her, if they would. Let them all see her in her gown of white and whisper behind their hands that the Chancellor's daughter has made herself available. Let them see how she dances around the fire, how grown up she has become even though she has only just begun to wear her hair down like a woman instead of in a maiden's upsweep. Let them see how she has grown, how the gown does not fall straight, but curves with the rise and fall of her bosom. Let them see...

No, she amended. Let the Stranger see.

Let him see how lonely she has been her whole life.

"Please," she prayed quietly to all that was Great and Divine. "Please let him see before Cullen Marst does."


	5. Chapter 5

This was a mistake, Isolde thought to herself. Her cheeks flushed scarlet, hot and splotchy in embarrassment. Her skin glowed like sunburn against the white gown. Genny was right, of course. She sulked, pulling the petals from a wilted daisy. She never should have worn this gown. Cullen Marst, the wheezing old widower in charge of the food storehouses, hadn't left her alone for a single moment. She felt filthy in front of him, and winced every time his watery eyes crawled down the front of her dress like hairy spiders. As well as his fat purse, he was fond of showing off his silly toys and contraptions. Tonight he proudly flashed a strange hollow tube that could expel a noisy blast of fire.

"Simply pull the trigger," he pointed, but Isolde was too far away in thought to acknowledge him, "and hunting becomes that much simpler. We could double the store of meat before the onset of winter with this lovely little thing..."

"Lovely," she repeated dimly, and scanned the crowd once more in agony. His hands pawed her shoulders, offering a thimble of ale or some little crumpet from his withered fingers.

She smiled demurely, fighting the gag reflex. "No, thank you kindly all the same."

To make matters worse, Relia and Laramie - the daughters of her mother's closest advisors - had been laughing at her all evening, pointing and snickering like a couple of old biddy washerwomen.

They should talk! Relia was only lucky her baby hadn't begun to show yet. Her father would kill her if he knew the man responsible was already married with a houseful of simpering whelps. Isolde was no fool; she knew Relia had been to see the chemist, a fat and bedraggled woman with tiny human teeth interwoven like pearls through her long graying braids. She'd seen her at least twice before for the same...malady. No doubt someday soon the dawn would reveal yet another tiny grave in some secluded spot beyond the valley, and there would rest forever more uneasy remains of a moment's blind and thoughtless passion.

As for Laramie... That little hypocrite had a few secrets as well, things that would destroy her if anyone knew. For instance, only Isolde knew how Laramie's lover had spoken to her in the stable that afternoon, speaking words of such violent passion that Isolde cringed to hear them in her hiding place. Doublets had flown off, skirts hiked up, and...well, things had happened.

Laramie needed not concern herself with the problem of becoming with child, as Relia had. Her lover was as much a woman as she was. But such things didn't matter to Isolde. She wasn't spiteful, in the way of some girls, and would never use her knowledge to hurt someone. But if one needed all of a sudden to gain the upper hand in a situation, such information could be quite useful.

Oh, where was he? She wandered through the drunken crowds, trying feverishly to appear nonchalant. Had she truly expected him to come here tonight...and for her? He was a Stranger, and she knew as well as anyone that most Strangers refused with benign grace to attend Festival, begging pardon for their own quiet and enigmatic celebrations that fell upon the same day. Her apprehension rose as her spirits sank, finding no balance as the crowds parted for her, boring into her with dark, inquisitive eyes.

"The Chancellor's daughter is ready to wed!"

"Wearing white already? She's so young!"

"I've worn white for years. She will too, more than likely."

She blushed deeper, ashamed of herself for thinking that this gown might announce her interest to him, and perhaps catch his interest as well. Why couldn't she have tossed a silken handkerchief from her window to catch his attention, or a trinket? At least that would have said what she wanted him to know. Even a demure smile might have been enough. But no. She reproached herself for her youth and naivety. To believe that a simple white gown might be enough to summon him forth and into a sea of revelers so unlike his own people...foolish! Instead, it had summoned Cullen and his like, men made of crawling fingers with their souls in their purses-

"So the Chancellor's daughter wears white."

Isolde turned at this new voice, sweet and gentle without a trace of mockery. He had spoken a simple statement of fact, and had she only imagined the tint of satisfaction to his voice?

He had dressed for the occasion, as young men did. Festival demanded that all men should wear sapphire and scarlet tunics over white breeches, while those looking for mates donned white sashes at their waists. Her eyes dropped quickly, finding the tasseled white sash twisted into a love knot.

He smiled beneath her scrutiny, looking down at his sash. "As do I."

"I see," she said, her cheeks burning with humiliation. Yes, she saw, but couldn't imagine why such an exquisite creature as this would still be searching for a wife. Surely any woman in Lo would be happy to make him her own. Perhaps he had not yet found the proper lady; perhaps, she feared, he was very particular and might bolt once he saw how large her teeth were, or the strange, peach-shaped birthmark on her fish-white stomach. She blushed again, realizing how far ahead she dared imagine.

He moved toward her to allow a drunkard to pass behind him. She gasped as the Stranger drew closer, and she, hardly able to breathe, inhaled the dark scent of violets closing in around them.

She swallowed thickly, the lump prominent in her dry throat. "I am Isolde,"

she managed at last without croaking. She cleared her throat, smiling abashedly.

A slow smile touched the corners of his mouth. "I know who you are. I saw you in the window today."

"If you know who I am, then you know my mother is Chancellor Tamlyn," she ventured. "Does that frighten you?"

He laughed, and she smiled in spite of her nervousness. "No, it doesn't. Should it?"

"Only if you've something to hide," she teased.

He nodded thoughtfully. "Then I suppose I should be honest with you. When I saw you in the window earlier, I don't believe you were wearing white."

She blushed furiously, heavy tears of shame fighting for release. He knew that she had done this just to get his attention, and had at last called her out to make her look like a fool. "No," she admitted painfully. "I wasn't."

He sighed with relief. "Then I haven't lost my chance with you."

Her heart had never behaved so wildly, nor could she remember it ever beating with such animal ferocity. It rose and sank in her chest, and she balanced herself on quivering knees, horrified that she might collapse at any moment. But he offered his hand for support, and smiled with the beauty of an angel when she gratefully slipped her cool, trembling hand in his.

She felt the host of dark-eyed stares boring into her like tiny darts, prickling at the back of her neck and in the pit of her stomach. She blanched at the feel of her own hands, clammy and cold with sweat, but he didn't seem to notice. Indeed, her skin slipped silken-fine against his palm, liquid-smooth as quicksilver as he led her into the crowd.

The people's interest in the Chancellor's daughter did not wholly detract from their revels. Even now Relia and Laramie and others not so fortunate to have found even a temporary partner for Festival grasped one anther's hands and danced around the bonfire's wooden bones to the strains of ancient owl bone flutes, lacquered mandolins, and the thumping of stretched-hide drum heads. Pretty soon, the Chancellor would appear and give her people permission to set the tower of sticks and twigs and dried branches fully ablaze.

He gestured to the musicians. All of them, Isolde remarked with surprise, had hair the color of sun-baked sand half-hidden beneath their hooded cowls. The flute player nodded and removed the owl bone flute from her lips with a tiny moue of disgust. She, in turn, signaled to her companions, and the music stopped.

Before the crowd had time to complain, the music began again with a single, clear-throated note, star-bright and crystalline. Long seconds later, the skillful strumming of a mandolin joined perfectly, adding its own mellow voice to the liquid beauty of breath transformed. Little by little, note by precious note, the song ascended, adding hollow drums and finally the thin, transparent voice of a young female Stranger.

No one moved when she sang to them; not a soul took her eyes and heart from the beautiful Strangers cloaked in the simple garb of Lo, creating music so exquisite that it might not even be found in the temple of the Chancellor.

A voice, the beat of a drum, the wind of a flute...these were simple enough things, but in the hands of the Strangers they became something worth dying for.

The young Stranger raised her voice and hands to the people who watched her so heavily. "Dance," she sang to them, her body moving as sinuously as any rill ever dared. "Dance with your lovers, and sleep tonight in the arms of peace."

Isolde forced herself not to look at the striking young woman. Her twin toned eyes flashed cool and somber, and not (Isolde thought) entirely sane.

In spite of the evening's chill, she felt a renegade drop of sweat trickle down her back. Her own beautiful Stranger hadn't taken his eyes from her, either.

"Is she your lover?" Isolde asked. His gaze shifted sharply back to her. She had begun to sing again, whisper words in a language Isolde had never heard before. The language of Strangers, perhaps.

"No," he said, and squeezed her hand. "That's my sister Lyra. She has a beautiful voice, doesn't she?"

Isolde nodded, relief falling over her like a cool curtain.

"I asked her to play a song for us," he said, touching two fingers to

Isolde's chin. "Let's not waste it. I am Garreth." He bowed deeply before her in the tradition of all fine young men of Lo. "I beg the honor of this dance."

The Chancellor might have been taken with the young man who had so captured her daughter's attentions tonight; more likely, she might have looked upon him with an eye of distrust, something she frequently did when young men dared lock Isolde in their sights. Isolde was still a child, barely two years past her first bleeding, and hardly in control of herself. Who was she to make such an important decision as finding a mate, especially when it might later affect the prosperous spirit of their beloved Lo?

But the Chancellor had not yet arrived.

It was a good thing, too, for she would certainly have squashed that which had already begun to grow between Isolde and Garreth. She was a child of Lo, and would be expected to marry a man of Lo. So had it always been. But as soon as they met face to face, hand in hand, Isolde could see the rigid and unyielding lines of her destiny blur and run like whitewash in the rain.

They danced with their eyes, their skin, the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet. Gazes melted into one another until the rest of the

world was but a dim shadow. He might have known her forever from the way his hands held her waist with such irreproachable gentleness; she might have just rediscovered him from a beloved, long-lost dream the way she pressed her woman-girl's body against him, stroking the pale down on the back of his neck with light, curious fingers.

He breathed his perfumed breath against her ear, raising the tiny hairs on her arms, and placed her hands to his lips. His hands drew hers lower until they rested on the love-knotted sash about his waist. Isolde's eyes widened; the crowd gave a collective gasp, unheard over the pounding in her ears, as he helped her untie the love knot.

"Your blood is my blood," he whispered, "My life is yours, if you will have it."

Somewhere in her mind, she shrank from his words, from the duskiness of his voice and the suddenness of the proposal.

"Garreth, I cannot!" She drew away, the silence strong and pervasive now.

"My mother would never allow this! You are a Stranger! She would never accept you!"

He kissed her forehead, sending a sweet chill through the pit of her stomach. "And you? Could *you* accept me?"

Could she?

Could she accept the beating of her own heart if the entire world suddenly went still and cold?

Had she not accepted the thousand traditions and customs demanded of her by her station?

Her heart rose to her throat as, to the horror of the festival attendants, she began to speak.

"I accept you and all that you are, and I pledge myself in return," she recited in a wavering voice, remembering the proper utterance from days and months and years of training. Around her, the crowd looked at one another in stark disbelieving silence.

She had never believed it would be like this, so sudden and unstructured. She had imagined a great temple and a faceless bridegroom, the two of them flanked by myriads of strangers and diplomats. She felt the heat of his breath and heard the distant crackle of wood as someone threw a torch and set the bonfire ablaze.

With fingers that would be deft were they not trembling so badly, she drew the ends of the sash around her own waist, tying them at the small of her back. The sash encircled them both as she completed her vows.

"Our lives are now bound, as we are bound together-"

"ISOLDE!"

She tore her eyes from him only to meet The Chancellor's horrified, imperious glare. She had not even taken her seat before being met with the sight of her daughter - in white! why is she wearing white?!? - and now...THIS!

"-bythissymbolofourlove," Isolde finished quickly.

The Chancellor's mouth flopped open and closed spastically. For the first time in her life, she had been shocked to silence. Her daughter - her ONLY daughter - had just wed a Stranger. Without her knowledge. Without her permission.

And without her presence.

Isolde met her mother's furious gaze with pale-faced temerity. She turned in Garreth's arms, gripping his hands tightly. "Chancellor Tamlyn," she announced boldly in an excellent impression of her mother's voice. She sounded insistent and regal, and although her voice cracked, it did not break. "I present...my husband."


	6. Chapter 6

During the tumult that ensued, Isolde's father Colm sat quietly by, sipping at a flagon of strong brandy and doing his part by simply - wisely - staying out of it. Chancellor Tamlyn hovered like a raptor, occasionally clucking her tongue and sighing deeply with every breath. Angry? Oh no...this was rage. Muted, yes, but sheer and striking as Aloetian silk from across the sea.

Stone sconces winced beneath the licking blue-orange flames, swept in the breezes stirred by the Chancellor's pacing. Isolde and Garreth sat stone quiet in her presence, waiting for the winds to knock them both down in a storm of unsurpassed fury. They held one another's hands tightly, suppressing the invisible quake that passed like a current between them.

She stole a glance at Colm as she passed by the pair sitting coiled and silent on the divan, huddled together as though the roof might fall on them at any moment. It might, she thought silently. It just might. Colm sipped his brandy, staring at Isolde with watery, thoughtful eyes. He was as much to blame as anyone. She was like him in so many ways, her head always in the clouds, her eyes always seeking the stars instead of the good solid ground beneath her feet.

What could she have been thinking?

From the looks of the young man, she hadn't been thinking at all. When face-to-face with a creature like that, there could be little room for thought. But there was nothing she could do about it; there was nothing anyone could do about it. The Ceremony of Exchange was a ritual dating back to Lo's first wave of settlers, and could not be revoked or broken. Not even by the Chancellor, herself. There was no divorce in Lo, nor any official separation; only death could sever this bond. The best a couple - any couple - could do was to get separate beds.

Still, this did not mean she couldn't separate them. If she chose, she could part them forever with but a word. Perhaps send Isolde away to a finishing school and make young Garreth a Traveling Minister to Rysling, in the cold regions where the sun never shone and no flowers grew. Ever.

"You disappoint me," she intoned. It was enough to make Isolde wince. Garreth opened his mouth as though to explain or soothe, but Chancellor Tamlyn's hand was in the air before he could utter a breath.

"I will not hear from you," she proclaimed, eyes flashing coldly at her new son-in-law. "You have no rights to speak in this matter."

Garreth's mouth closed, his jaws clenching until his ears moved. Isolde squeezed his hands reassuringly.

"How," the Chancellor began, "can I allow you - my only daughter, and the only heir to the Chancellorship - to act so rashly? You're merely a child!"

"Chancellor-" Isolde began.

"However much it pains you, you are to address me as 'Mother.'"

"Mother, then," she managed. "I made myself available tonight. I chose a suitor, then a husband. I am NOT a child."

"You ARE a child, and a foolish one at that!"

Isolde shook her head. "I behaved impetuously, but I am not a fool. Garreth and I-"

"I am not speaking of him!" she hissed. "I am speaking of you! How could you do this to your people? To me?" she added quickly.

"I have done nothing to hurt the people of Lo!" she snapped quickly. "I am not yet Chancellor. My choice of a husband does not affect them."

"Your choice of a husband, particularly a Stranger, affects us all."

"Is that it, then? That I have chosen Garreth over Cullen Marst?"

Chancellor Tamlyn's face went scarlet. It was no secret that Cullen Marst had been the Chancellor's top choice for years, never mind that he was older than the Chancellor, herself. Now in one night, Isolde had destroyed the prospect utterly, and with full knowledge. "Isolde, listen to me," she said slowly, as though talking to a very small child. "You have just wed a man you do not know, and I fear that you are far too young to understand what you have done."

"I understand very well what I have done," she murmured lowly. "I have avoided marriage to a man I do not love. I have chosen Garreth for my companion, Mother, and he will be the father of my children. I need never be lonely again."

The Chancellor blinked in surprise. Lonely?

Certainly, Isolde had always been a quiet child, deep in her own thoughts as she stared out tower windows watching the working children of Lo play jacks-and-stones, or following the raindrops with dark-eyed intensity. Perhaps, the Chancellor reflected as her feet wore a path across the lush carpets of her private chamber, she had not showered her daughter with the love and affection and attention she had deserved; perhaps she should have spent more time with her, grooming her as a successor, perhaps even playing with her now and again...

But lonely? The Chancellor shook her head vehemently. Isolde always had the best of everything! Tutors, maids, friends...why, if the daughters of her closest advisors (Delia...no, Relia! And Laramie, yes?) were not excellent and worthy companions for one of Isolde's caliber, then who possibly could be?

Could she truly have been so lonely that she would marry - without her mother's permission or knowledge! - the first creature that happened along her path?

Or the first creature that wasn't Cullen Marst?

The Chancellor sank into her cushioned seat, and two handmaidens rushed to her side. She shooed them away, agitated.

"Why did you never tell me?" she beseeched. "You could have spoken to me. I would have given you companions and playmates and..." She listened to herself speak of negotiating friendships and supplying companions as though they were commodities like spices and silks. She heard herself throw the notion of friends about as though they grew common in fields, in neat little rows for anyone to pick up.

She must have heard it then, the foolishness in her own voice, or perhaps she saw it etched in their faces as they looked upon her. But she did hear it, and fell silent.

"I could allow this," she said at last, and Isolde's mouth opened to a surprised O. "But let me finish before you think I am doing you a service."

"I could allow you to feel the pains of your foolishness and repent in your own time. But know this," she whispered, her husky face dark as dusk. "Your repentance will not come easily. When you come to know this fellow as more than a body and a face, when you come to understand and fear the strange proclivities and the stranger pleasures men demand of their wives...perhaps then you will understand how hasty you have been."

She squeezed Garreth's hand, and he caressed Isolde's palm with a gentle finger as if to prove her mother wrong.

"When I am gone," she went on, "and you are Chancellor, and you grow bored with the foolish wants and whims of a husband you never really knew..." she threw Colm a black glance and he lowered his head guiltily.

"What will you do then? Will you do what I have done and leave him to his hobbies and his drink? Will you satisfy yourself with state - and other - affairs when the time comes? Will it be enough for you when he proves his true worth?" Her mother's eyes lowered in exhaustion.

"You don't know him, Isolde," she sighed, her voice shrunken but still authoritative. "You know nothing about this man."

"I know his name is Garreth," she said without missing a beat, "and I know that I will grow to love him, in time. That is enough for now." The Chancellor sighed deeply, digging her nails into the clammy flesh of her own palms. Stupid, stupid girl. She remained silent for an agonizing moment, her lips pressed clamshell tight as her hands picked at imaginary threads in the deep scarlet-purple robes.

"Very well," she said at last. "I've no doubt that the people are talking already of what you two have done. Let them gossip tonight. Tomorrow, we make plans for a formal ceremony. Now both of you," she glared coolly from one to the other, "get out of my sight."

Moments later, locked away from the world behind the doors of Isolde's chambers, they finally allowed themselves to breathe. Isolde closed the curtains, blocking out the sight of Festival fires and the violent-laden aroma of smoke.

"You were wonderful," he said, releasing her hand. "But she hates me."

Isolde nodded her agreement, and he blanched. "She has no love for either of us at the moment. She has no patience for those who act rashly."

"Do you regret it?"

"I think it all happened very quickly, but I don't regret what we've done. I have no reason to. You saved me from Cullen Marst."

He raised an eyebrow. "Is that the only reason you accepted me?"

She opened her mouth, but he quickly put a finger to her lips. "No. Don't answer that. Maybe someday you can tell me, but tonight I don't want to know."

Isolde shrugged and looked down at her feet. "My mother will never really forgive me for what happened tonight," she said softly. "She thinks I deceived her. I suppose I did, in a way. She had my whole life planned out, and I shattered her wondrous vision like glass. I can't imagine how she feels."

"I never wanted to cause a rift between you and your mother," he told her.

"That was never my intention."

"She created the rift herself, years before I was born," Isolde murmured.

"She means well, I know she does, but to her I've always been just another obligation. She MUST rule wisely. She MUST play the lovely diplomat. She MUST bear a daughter to take her place." Isolde plopped down on the edge of the bed and grabbed up a pillow, hugging it close. "It's no secret that I was born of necessity, and not of love."

He sat down next to her feeling the deep inadequacy of consolation. Her dark eyes shone with new tears, and she drew back as he reached out to wipe them away.

"She's right," she whispered, a tear slipping lazily down her cheek. "I don't know you. And you don't know me." She buried her face in the pillow.

"This is all my fault. If I hadn't wanted to see you again so badly..."

"I would have come for you anyway," he assured her, and took the pillow, tossing it on the floor. Teardrops glistened like jewels on the fine fabric. He brushed a curling ribbon of black hair away from her face and she closed her eyes as his smooth, slender fingers caressed her damp cheek.

"Not even the Chancellor herself could have kept me away."

"My whole life," he told her in a slow, dark whisper, "I've loved the violets that grow down in the valley. How rare they are, how they drink in the moonlight. It's a blessing to see one up close, you know. They wilt if you draw too near, and die at just a touch."

She nodded, yes, she knew.

"That's what you reminded me of when I saw you in the window. I was afraid you might die when you let me take your hand tonight. But you were shining right through it all, radiant as the moon on one of those violets.

"No one really knows you. They - all those people that have groomed and primed you for the Chancellorship - they've never known what makes you laugh and the dreams you dream. They see only the future Chancellor, with all her duties and obligations. There's so much more to you than that. It would have killed me to see you accept someone like Cullen Marst."

He was right. She had been molded, sculpted, chiseled and shaped by a slew of political craftsmen since the day she was born. Made ready for Cullen Marst or another man of means to add his wealth to her own and fortify the Chancellor's treasury.

"What do you see in me?" she asked. "Do you see the ruler I will be? Or do you see the same tired, scared little girl I see whenever I look in the mirror?"

A simple smile alleviated her fears. "Isolde, you are the moon on the water. You are every star in the sky and every dream that ever came true. I've seen your face on the backs of my eyes, and I've smelled you on my skin every morning of my life. When I saw you today, standing in the window of that tower, I didn't think I could ever love you more."

She sat in stunned silence, only half-believing in the truth of his words. No one had ever spoken such things to her, or touched her so gently. She felt the furious beating of his heart through his fingertips and heard the pulse of it in his voice. She swallowed against the lump in her throat.

"Until now."

Words failed, and he took her face in his hands, devouring her skin, her lips, and the dark eternities of her eyes.

"You may not love me yet, but I loved you before you were born. I'll love you until we die," he promised, kissing her fingers with fevered lips. He took her sobbing body into his arms and kissed her face, her eyelids, the damp curve of her throat. She twined her fingers through his fine, pale hair and received their first kiss. He tasted of summer and shade and the dark, soft flavor of violets.

"You'll never be alone again, Isolde," he said between kisses, between the unlacing of silken ties and the unraveling of the white love knot. "I swear it. I'll be there for you as the world falls down, until the end of days comes to pass. I will never, ever leave you."


	7. Chapter 7

The formal ceremony took place three days later in the town center, beneath the monument to a child whose memory had persisted far more intact than her gravestone. The ceremony itself was silent and strained, for every Stranger in Lo had turned out to witness the union of their two worlds.

Isolde dared a glance into the crowd. There were Relia and Laramie standing together, grim and envious, molded smiles curling their mouths. Cullen Marst looked on in tight-lipped disapprobation, his fingers twitching like nervous spiders ready to jump at someone's throat. Citizen and Stranger alike lined every street, hung from every window and door, and craned their necks to have a look at the bride and her groom.

To look at the Chancellor, you'd believe that all was good and proper, and every star had its place in the heavens. She presided over the proceedings with a look of perfect contentment. But Isolde knew the little nuances of her mother's demeanor; she had never seen her so pale and preoccupied.

Chancellor Tamlyn knew well the necessity of a convincing lie. After all, diplomacy was her art and trade.

"We have all witnessed today the exchange of vows between this man and this woman. We stand as testament to the strength of their love and the intentions of their hearts. If you would agree to the strength and validity of this union, be silent in your consent. If you would contest the actions of these lovers, come forth now and testify so that all may know the reasons."

"STOP THIS!"

All heads turned at the grating, hysterical sound piping through the crowd like a squeaky wheel. Isolde's heart fell down into her feet and Garreth reached out to steady her. The crowds rippled and parted as an old woman pushed and shoved her way to the front. She was filthy and ragged, her hands cracked and leathery from years of laundering other people's garments. Her white hair swam around her face in a hysterical halo as she screeched.

"This cannot be! He's one o' them! He's an owl!"

A harsh murmur swept through the crowds as the old woman moved forward and stopped before Garreth.

"He's the leader!" she shrieked, poking her scrawny finger at his chest.

"He brought them all down here to destroy us!" She turned to the crowd, sermonizing to faces twisted with disbelief. "Saw them, I did! They flew down from Ornithon on wings jus' like in the picture books in the temple!

They had great big round eyes and claws," she hooked her crony fingers into talons, "that could tear out your hearts!"

The crowd looked on in silent anguish. From further away, someone laughed uncomfortably. A child began to cry, and then another. Chancellor Tamlyn's mouth was a bright red slash on her expressionless white face. Even she did not seem to know what to say.

Finally, she set her gaze upon the old woman, who shrank a little beneath its weight. "As everyone here, you have the Right of Objection," she intoned. "Where is your proof?"

"Proof?!" The old woman moaned. "My eyes are my proof! They saw the coming of the Strangers! My tongue is my proof, for it bears witness to the foul creatures among us! What better proof than the word of a loyal and faithful subject?"

Chancellor Tamlyn gave a curt nod to a stout young woman nearby, who promptly stepped forward and caught the crone by the arm.

"Let go of me!" she howled, jerking her arm away. Another officer joined the first, and together they removed the old woman from the plaza, dragging her along yowling and screeching like a dying catamount.

"You'll see!" she screeched, stretching back so that she could see the bride and groom, who stared at her with horrible pity.

"Death will come to you all! It won't be just the children this time! They'll come after us all! They'll rip our eyes out as we sleep and peck the flesh from our dying bodies! YOU WILL ALL SUFFER FOR THEIR LOVE!"

Garreth looked out across the townspeople and caught the faces of his own kind. They too dared to exhale now that she was gone.

Chancellor Tamlyn took a deep breath and went on. "If there are no more objections, we may continue."

There were no more objections as Garreth tied the sash around their waists. The only other outcry came as the couple had their consummating kiss, and this from the celebrating masses. The lovers slipped their arms around one another as they had in their previous nights together, and whispered sweet I Love You's in earnest.

A grand bonfire was again built in the town center, this time for Garreth's and Isolde's post nuptial celebrations. As the lovers danced around the fire, their eyes only on each other, the stout young officer with flaming auburn hair approached Chanceller Tamlyn with a red handkerchief.

"The old woman's 'proof,' Chancellor," she announced lowly, and retreated. Chancellor Tamlyn spread the handkerchief out over her lap and nodded her approval. No one saw her refold the corners to the center, careful not to touch the gory contents. If anyone saw her throw it into the fire, they said nothing.


	8. Chapter 8

In the first years after her daughter's marriage, Chancellor Tamlyn treated her new son-in-law with the iciest regard. She regularly snubbed him at meals, at ceremonies, even in the narrowest halls when two could hardly pass without touching. She made his position very clear; he was family only by marriage, and never by blood.

Her husband Colm was more receptive - he invited young Garreth into his isolated world and shared his knowledge of Lo's history as freely as he shared his wine. Warm, bright and inquisitive, Garreth consumed not only the companionship, but the massive tomes documenting Lo's beginnings, shuddering and marveling at the dark history of his new and much beloved home.

When the winter months came and the days felt short and lonely, Isolde curled up in an armchair between the two men she loved, a blanket over her lap and a book in her hands.

Garreth and Isolde conceived their first child when the midnight chiming of the city bells found them alone within the walls of the library. At the child's birth, the nurses claimed he refused to cry, choosing instead to yawn placidly at them and stare with huge, curiously blue eyes. As he grew older, only one eye remained this pure, cerulean blue; the other turned the pure liquid gold of the sun on crystal waters, mirroring his father's gaze perfectly.

His silence set the pattern for much of his childhood. As he grew older, he spoke when occasion demanded it, but mostly he preferred the company of books to that of people - no surprise, some said, considering where he was rumored to have been conceived.

Garreth and Isolde named him Ombra, for he was a dark little thing, shadow-thin and quiet as a fieldmouse. He may have worn his mother's delicate beauty and his father's piercing stare, but Ombra truly belonged only to Ombra.

And then, Alba.

Chancellor Tamlyn's face cracked like a dry clay mask when Isolde placed the tiny pink bundle into her arms. She wept real tears onto the soft rosy face, kissed the tiny hands that grasped and pulled her meticulous raven hair. To Ombra she looked like a wiggly pink worm, cold and wet and dirty against his mother's breast. He found it difficult to look at her with anything but disgust until she began to walk, and then he found a word for the feeling: jealousy.

But, being Ombra, he never said so.

Sweet little cookie-faced Alba could do no wrong. She grew from a crib-bound babe to a toddler, then at last to a sure-footed imp, always with the adoring eye of Chancellor Tamlyn to watch over her. The Chancellor - his grandmother - had never paid him so much attention as she did Alba, who had taken the woman's heart and squeezed it in her sticky little paws.

Grandmother hood had done wonderful things for Lo's leader. She no longer spoke to Colm as though he was a servant, and once or twice she was caught holding his hand at public events. She could even be persuaded to smile fondly upon Garreth from time to time, for without him her darling Alba would not have come to be.

Blonde-haired, black-eyed Alba had done something few had thought possible - she had penetrated the Chancellor's stern, driven demeanor. Even Isolde noticed the change in her stolid mother, quirking an eyebrow as the Chancellor's dignified robes, jewels, and headdress became fodder for a game of dress-up. Isolde stood at the window, Garreth's arms wrapped around her, each in sudden pale shock to see the Chancellor playing hide-and-seek with her little granddaughter in the temple gardens.

"She never played like that with me," Isolde said. The little tremble in her voice surprised her. She had been used to the solitude she'd had as a child, and had never known what she was missing. Garreth kissed her neck and held her close to him. In his strong reassuring arms, she felt warm and misty, like a child half-roused from slumber.

"Your mother's getting older." He nuzzled her ear, nibbling puckishly at the sensitive lobe. "This is her last chance to get it right."

She heard Alba's shrill giggles piping up from below, and smiled with tears in her eyes. Everywhere she turned now, loving faces surrounded her. Thoughts of her children, her parents, her own beloved Garreth moved through her like spirits, each touching her heart with gentle, ghostly fingers, constantly reminding her that she loved and was loved.

Isolde closed her eyes as his Garreth's solid fingers breezed over the back of her gown. His eyes devoured hers as the gown slipped from her shoulders.

"It doesn't have to be her last chance," she whispered and, taking her husband's hand, led him to their bed.

Though Alba held tight reins on her grandmother's heart, there were still some things she could not do. Even at four, she had to obey the rules. Amma said so, and Amma was the Chancellor, so her word made law. She was never to go into the towers set high upon the temple, for instance; they swayed dangerously in strong winds, and the rafters drooped like old rotted-lace curtains. Also, she could never leave the temple alone. This chafed her from time to time, especially when her chambers smelled so strongly of violets that she could hardly bear to stay inside, and worse even when the temple grew warm with summer's heat and she could see the sparkling blue spring-fed lakes that dotted the valley from her window. But if she asked nicely, Amma always took her swimming, or strolled with her through the temple gardens.

Alba might bend the rules a little, but she never broke them. For example, she'd figured out long ago that she wasn't allowed to take more than one cookie, but if she ASKED for another, who would turn her down?

While Genny cat-napped in her chair, warmed by the afternoon sun, Alba sauntered out into the corridor beyond her room, her favorite doll tucked beneath her arm like a treasured book. The temple was so quiet today, but Mama said it always got this way right before Festival. Most everyone milled together in the Town Center, building the bonfire and making bird-figures out of rags and stones. She wasn't even sure where Ombra was - probably visiting Appa in his library, learning about the horrible things that happened in Lo a thousand years ago and more.

She felt a tiny black maelstrom brewing in her tummy, swirling with sparkling green envy. Appa always lifted her up and bounced her on his knee, but he had given Ombra his own desk in the library with his own books and maps and everything he wanted when he turned nine last year. Ombra even had his own thimble-sized cup that Appa filled with brandy whenever 'the boys' - Appa and Daddy and Ombra - started storytelling. She had no idea why Ombra liked listening to those icky stories. They were full of bad, dark things that she never wanted to know or understand. With a child's sense of time, she wondered how old Amma and Appa were, and if they remembered when the bad things happened.

"Alba!"

Alba looked around quickly, and caught the flickering ghost of a pale figure disappearing around the corner. She knew she mustn't follow - she knew Amma would be upset! - but she found her feet moving one-then-another through dusty corridors and twisting hallways she couldn't remember ever seeing before. At last, she stood before a huge faded tapestry. Alba touched the silken embroidery, tracing the curve of white wings stitched dark with red, red blood.

A hand, pale white with sharply tapering fingers reached from behind the tapestry and swept it aside. Alba coughed at the dust stirred up, but peered beyond at the white lady standing with the tapestry pushed aside, waiting. Welcoming.

Alba blinked. "Aunt Lyta?"

"Hi, nestling," Lyta cooed. She made a silky gesture with her hands. "Come on. Let's play."

Alba shook her head and took a step back, hugging her dolly. Lyta was Daddy's sister, but she wasn't like him at all. She smiled grimly when Mama was around, and always looked at Amma like she was something nasty on the bottom of her slipper. She didn't come around much anymore, not since the argument in the gardens.

Daddy could speak the Strangers' tongue, but he preferred to talk like Amma and Appa and Mama, and he wanted Alba to speak like them too. As a result, Alba had only picked up bits and pieces of the language Aunt Lyta and the other Strangers spoke among themselves.

But she knew an argument when she heard it, and Daddy and Aunt Lyta were definitely arguing. Alba crouched low, mulberry juice staining her mouth and chin red-purple. She'd gotten it all over her dress too, so of course the only thing she could do was to hide so that no one would see what she'd done and give her a reproachful look (no one was allowed to scold her, understand).

When Daddy stormed out, he saw a tiny slippered foot sticking out from beneath a cluster of greenery. He called Alba out (there's that reproachful look!) and swept her quickly, nervously, into his arms. The last thing Alba heard Aunt Lyta say as they rushed away and back into the temple wasn't even a whisper, and it definitely wasn't in the Strangers' tongue:

"Traitor!"

Alba wasn't quite sure what that meant, but it didn't sound very nice. And after that, Daddy wouldn't speak to Aunt Lyta anymore.

"I've got something wonderful to show you!" Aunt Lyta said, and clapped her hands. "But you have to come up with me. To the tower. You can only see it from there."

"Amma says-"

"Amma said you couldn't go alone," she reminded her. "She didn't say you couldn't go with someone. And who better than family?" Lyta's eyes flickered. "Who better than your Auntie Lyta?"

Alba had never been to the tower, and she was dying to know what was up there now that Lyta had told her something grand was waiting. She shuffled her feet and her pale cheeks glowed like pink neon. The she took a step forward.

"That's right, nestling." Lyta put out her hand. "Don't be afraid."

Alba put her dolly down in the hall near the stairs and told her to be a very good girl until she came back for her. She took Aunt Lyta's hand, cold and stiff like paper, and started up the stairs. By the time they'd reached the tower, Alba's feet ached and she was a little out of breath. The place smelled awful, worse even than what came up from the stables when the air felt heavy and humid. Some kind of bird had made a home here; she could see feathers and bones all over the place. The heat stifled clear thought, and filth covered the floor in layers.

Alba pursed her lips in disgust. "What is it, Aunt Lyta? What's there to see?"

Lyta's face had lost its pallor; she was glowing nearly as brightly as Alba, and her eyes burned frantic and feverish. "Over here, chick. Right up here." She lifted Alba to the tower window and set her upon the sill.

Aunt Lyta was right; the view was miraculous from here. She could see the whole world from this window! The people below all looked like ants or maybe even aphids, and the bones of the bonfire seemed little more than a pile of twigs. Her feet dangled above empty space, pendulums in the roaring wind.

Alba froze, her hands digging into the windowsill. This didn't feel fun anymore. She wanted to go find Amma and climb into her lap, or at least go back to her room and lock the door behind her. But when she tried to wriggle backwards, Lyta's hand fell heavily on her shoulder.

"Little bird," she whispered, and stroked Alba's shining flaxen hair like a mistress grooming her lapdog. After a while the weight of Aunt Lyta's hand hurt, digging into her skull. "Tiny nestling. Did your daddy ever tell you that you could fly?"


	9. Chapter 9

Alba jumped, her heart fluttering like a hummingbird's wings as Lyta screeched out in a piercing, high tongue. It wasn't her language - it wasn't even the Strangers' language, which was soft and sounded like a thousand people sighing all at once. This sounded more like a bird - a whole flock of birds - in pain. She shrieked and called, hooting and howling into the wind. She caught the attention of a few people down below, some Strangers and some not, who pointed and gathered to see the mad woman screaming high up in the tower.

Garreth and Isolde were helping to shape and build bony sticks into the mannequin for tomorrow night's bonfire, but paused in mid-pass when the commotion began. People, Strangers and citizens alike, rushed toward the temple while Isolde and Garreth exchanged puzzled looks. A moment later, they too followed.

Garreth's face went pale as he looked up and saw the tiny dot in the tower window. Isolde screamed Alba's name, clutching at her husband's arm to steady herself before lunging forward, elbowing and pushing her way through the crowd, which relented only a little. Fascinated gawkers stood staring up at the tiny girl so high up, murmuring nervously about the woman behind her.

Garreth seized Ombra, stringing sticks together into the rough effigy of an owl, by the shoulders.

"Listen to me," he said slowly and carefully. "Remember when I told you that someday I would take you up into Mount Ornithon?"

Ombra crinkled his eyebrows in confusion. Daddy had told him that one night in the library, after Appa had fallen asleep over a huge tankard of sweet wine. Yes, he nodded. He remembered.

"Something's...going to happen, Ombra," he squeezed his son by the shoulders as tears welled in his eyes. "It's time to go up the mountain, only I can't go with you. You have to go alone, and you have to go now."

The child's sharp blue-gold eyes widened in fear, but only for a moment.

"It's a long way, I know. But there's nothing up there to hurt you. I swear it. Tell no one where you're going. When you get there, tell them-"

Someone screamed, cutting him off in mid-sentence. He looked up and his stomach fell into his knees.

He hugged his son, the dark child of his blood. "Tell them how I loved you all."

Garreth was not half so gentle as Isolde when he raced into the crowd. He tore forward, but progress was slow, so slow as he prodded and nudged and slogged his way through the fog of people. He didn't care what happened to Lyta - if he reached the tower in time, he would throw her from the window himself and laugh as her bones shattered on the cobblestones. He didn't care as long as Alba was all right. He pushed onward, grim-faced, with murder on his mind.

Lyta put her head out the tower window, laughing as the stiff winds whipped her pale, silvery hair around her head. She would have been beautiful if not for her eyes, which held no trace of sanity or compassion, and never had.

"So beautiful," she murmured, and smiled to hear Alba's tiny hiccupping sobs.

"Don't worry, little bird. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to teach you how to fly. You can, you know." She lowered her voice and looked around, as though it were a grand secret for just the two of them.

"You can fly. And Ombra. And Daddy, too, only he won't anymore. His whore and her people would never understand," she snarled, eyeing Isolde as she made slow and painful progress through the gathering crowds. Garreth had gone ahead of her, and was now about halfway to the temple.

She smiled. He would never make it.

"Your Daddy's forgotten everything we came here for. It was so easy to fit in, so easy to become you that they've all forgotten what they are. They actually love this place, think of it as home. So easy for them to dance and play and let it all just float away," she sang, and placed her hand flat against Alba's back. Alba choked out a jagged sob, tears staining her pale pink dress. "But you won't float, will you? You don't even know how to glide. Because HE never showed you!"

Alba yelped as her Aunt Lyta shoved her forward a few inches.

"So you mustn't be sad, little one," Lyta tsked. "The part you play is so very important to us all. You," she tapped Alba's button nose playfully, "will be the spark that kindles the fires of our revolution."

Alba held on to the windowsill. Her breath came in great, anxious gulps.

"Let me show you how we teach our young to fly," she whispered.

And pushed.

Isolde's world stopped. She saw a flash of white drop from the window and stared in horror, praying, please, please, let it be something else a bird her favorite doll but oh please no don't let it be Alba.

The crowds drew a single gasp. Isolde swam in a dark vacuum, her vision long and narrow and terrible as she watched Alba plummet in slow motion. Garreth turned to see his wife, but there were too many people, too many horrified expressions between them.

"I'm sorry," he sent to her across the crowds, across the matrix of voices and faces that kept him from her. He felt the tingle in his fingers, the rusty but familiar stirrings of transformation in his chest. "It's the only way."

Garreth crouched low and launched himself into the air. He met the sky with heartrending grace, stretching his long pale wings as he rocketed toward his little daughter. He heard that unified gasp again, and a chorus of outraged, horrified screams met his avian ears. He could hear them on the ground, pointing and shouting, the questions fixed in their voices.

He knew that they would never let him live now. He had only scant seconds to hope that his people - for they were truly his people now, all of them - weighed his deception against his child's life, and found the masquerade infinitely less important.

He hoped, but something in him knew that his death waited below when he touched down again. Better his below, he thought, than Alba's above.

Garreth heard her tiny, shrill screaming in one long and static note as he reached out for her. His talons clasped the shoulder of the little pink dress, slicing the fabric as he gained his hold. She swung like a floppy rag doll, her limbs flailing out as she screamed and sobbed.

He saw her eyes, the bewildered look on her face when she realized she was no longer falling. She hadn't quite grasped yet that everything would be all right now. He couldn't see how her puffy pink sleeve stretched at the seam, how the tiny threads had begun to pop one by one like summer corn. She was there below him in the first instant, and then she was gone.

Her face, her sweet angelic face, and the nightmare sound of the fabric ripping would haunt him for the rest of his days.

He had failed, and Alba's tiny, broken body lay twisted and sprawled horribly, unnaturally, on the cold hard ground. The cracks between the grayed stones filled with her blood, overflowing and trickling into the dust.

"Get away! Get back!" Isolde forced her way forward, in hysterics, and bent at her child's side.

Garreth touched down beside Isolde and withdrew into his human aspect. He reached out, trembling and horrified, and stroked his daughter's cheek and closed her wide, staring eyes. Deep red spread beneath her white hair like rose petals scattered over snow.

The townspeople stared in bitter silence. Tears pattered to the ground with the sound of rain, and a few people hugged one another, sobbing silently into each other's shoulders. But no one touched the Strangers.

"Isolde," Garreth croaked, and reached out to his wife.

She pulled away at his touch, unwilling to be further defiled by his filthy hands. She could no longer see him as her husband; she saw only the owl, the hated, demonic thing, squatting inside the man she once loved.

"Get away from us!" she shrieked, and pulled little Alba's body to her. She rocked her still, cooling child, screaming into the sky as blood covered her hands and her ivory gown.

The Chancellor stepped forward, her face grim and pasty. Even Colm stepped into the circle, his eyes darting up and back to Garreth and finally to the sweet face of his dead granddaughter. He wept very softly as the Chancellor released his hand.

And turned her glare on Garreth.

She clapped her hands and a host of guards emerged from the crowds, pointing their poison-tipped swords at Garreth's heart. Above them, Lyta screeched out one last mocking cacophony and launched herself from the window. She changed in mid-air, sailing along the breeze as gracefully as a single feather. She called to the crowds below, screeching wicked, obscene laughter even as the shot rang out and her head shattered in a spray of blood and bone.

Cullen Marst nodded approvingly and lowered the smoking hollow tube of his own design. It hadn't quite caught on for the purpose for which he had invented it - stockpiling food for the winter months - but at least now he'd made one good use of it.

"You lived among us," the Chancellor intoned, her eyes red-rimmed and dead as stones. "We welcomed you into our homes. Our beds. We've borne you children and loved you as family. All along you and yours have deceived us with lies and subversion-"

"Chancellor-"

"NO!" she shouted, and backhanded him across his smooth face. Salty tears stung his red, welted flesh. "You lost your right to speak when you spread your wings and let my granddaughter die."

Garreth looked desperately at Isolde. Surely she understood, surely she saw that he had only wanted to save her! But Isolde's eyes were full of her baby's blood and tangled limbs, and she could see nothing Guards ushered Garreth into the temple, surrounding him on all sides, pushing and crowding close until he lay in the dust at their feet.

Chancellor Tamlyn motioned to her personal guards to bring Isolde along. They lifted her still holding Alba, for she would not allow them to take her away. Chancellor Tamlyn turned once and addressed her people, sealing the Strangers' fates.

"Kill them all," she told her people. "Not a single one of them should survive."

They disappeared inside the temple walls, the Chancellor listening with a tortured smile as pandemonium swept over the crowd like a pair of black wings.


	10. Chapter 10

Alba's death heralded the darkest days in Lo's long and turbulent history. Blood flowed freely in the streets, gelling and clotting in great stagnant pools. Mothers and fathers set fire to the cradles where slept their pale-haired babies, or drowned their tiny sleeping bodies in slimy wooden cisterns; dark-eyed husbands ran through their Stranger wives and children with stakes and swords, or throttled them outright on the streets for all to see. Homes burned, throats slit, all love and compassion forgotten and torn asunder in the wake of the Strangers' betrayal.

No babe, no man, no woman of Stranger heritage was allowed to escape alive. Some discarded their human bodies and tried to make it back to Mount Ornithon on a literal wing and a prayer, but arrows and Cullen Marst's fire-tube cut them down with the first glimmering of hope.

The pungent, acrid smells of burned flesh and singed feathers still hung over the Agris days after the last Stranger breathed her last breath. There was no celebrating this victory - too many lives, too many loves had been lost, and too many tears had been shed for the betrayal of family and friends.

Now only one Stranger remained, cooling his heels in the dungeon where guards threw him only snakes and rats and bats to eat. They gave him rancid water that smelled green and dank, and made him sick when he could no longer bear the thirst. He kicked their 'offerings' away with a shudder of revulsion as they laughed, taunting him.

"You don't like it? I thought you creatures couldn't resist a nice fat rodent!" a guard bellowed jovially from the hall.

Garreth said nothing, only turned his face to the wall in misery. In sleep he fought the sight of Alba's broken body; in waking, he could not escape the nightmare of Isolde's tears, her bloodied hands as they cradled his little daughter. He closed his eyes and thrust his fists against his ears when Lyta's screams rang all around, but he couldn't block out the sound.

Garreth's trial made for a short, bitter punch line. He'd had no defense, no one willing or by this time able to testify on his behalf - all his friends had either died or abandoned him when they discovered what he was.

All but Colm, who sat beneath the Chancellor's stern glare, and he dared not speak even a word in his defense.

Isolde had been inconsolable, unable to even look at him as the Chancellor pronounced the mocking court's sentence.

At last it ended, and Garreth bore the stamp of a condemned man. His execution loomed on the horizon like a single ghost-ship lost at sea. In three weeks - time enough for the moon to grow fat and jolly for his condemnation - he would die on the Agris before all of Lo.

He knew Chancellor Tamlyn punished him as much for Alba's death as for revealing his avian heritage. She disguised her persecutions well, using Lo's law as shield and shade, but she needn't have bothered - he did a fine job of punishing himself every moment of the day and night. He hoped that his lonely death would bring a sense of rightness back to her world, and to Isolde's.

He crossed his arms over his thin chest, trying to keep his heart from breaking. Isolde had forsaken him, in spite of all their loving days, in spite of the family they had made - and lost - together. He had loved her so deeply that every day, and the next beyond that, convinced him that he would happily die if only it could be within her reach.

"Don't look so glum, friend. Come sunrise, none of this will matter."

Garreth stared at the face leering through the iron bars. He squinted and sat up. "It's come already, then?"

The guard nodded, her brunette curls bobbing through the bars.

"It's not soon enough," he whispered.

"You might not think so if you knew what the Chancellor's got in store for you," she offered cheerfully.

"It's bound to be something superbly painful. We've got a wager going over whether you're to be burned at the stake, drowned, or beheaded. Knowing the Chancellor, she'll probably do all three and then display your bones on the Agris."

"Thank you for that." Sickened, he lay back down and covered his eyes and waited for sunrise.

Isolde sat at her window, pale and gaunt. The heavy smell of violets floated in on the wind, curling up and through her nostrils, bringing her to tears; however, the violets had little to do with the oceans of tears she shed daily.

She had little room and patience for thought, as the buzzing in her head had grown steadily louder over the past weeks. Her daughter dead, her son missing, probably murdered by the crazed people of Lo - her people, though she felt no kinship with them now.

Her husband imprisoned for... For what? Trying to save their daughter?

Idiot! She scolded herself, striking her temples with closed fists. You know why! You saw what he became! You saw Lyta in the window, watched as she pushed your baby from the tower... But he hadn't done it; he had tried to stop it the only way he knew how...

She rocked back and forth in her window seat, the buzzing so loud it had begun to vibrate behind her eyes. She wrung her hands until they cracked and fresh blood spilled onto her black mourning robes.

"Iffy."

She could not bring herself to turn around at the sound of her father's voice. He sounded weak and tired and old, so very old, that she could hardly imagine he had ever been young and happy. Instead she stayed still as the dead and let the tears fall one by one onto her stinging hands.

"Will you talk to me?" He came to sit at her side, his bones cracking and groaning as he took the floor beside her chair. She glanced at him briefly and saw how hollow his eyes were, how ancient and gray he had become in just this short time. She wondered, too, how she looked. Was she still young? She felt worn and used up as dust. Had it only been bare weeks since she had lost them all?

"I've never been much to you," he said, his voice cracking at the edges.

"To my shame, I've spent my years - your years - drunk as a tavern dog and hiding from your mother. I always thought it easier to sit back as she made and enforced the rules. This includes you." He reached out and touched her bleeding hand lightly. "I knew nothing about being a father. I still don't. But Iffy, I was a good Appa. And Garreth was a good son to me."

Isolde sobbed at the mention of his name. She tried to pull herself together, to keep her lip from trembling, but all for nothing.

"I've spent my life in your mother's shadow. She's made all the decisions. She's forged all the alliances, and meted and doled reward and retribution alike. But these...these horrors that have happened to our town, to our world since Alba..." He wiped his eyes across his sleeve.

Isolde glared at him. Was he drunk? Did he know what he was saying?

"History tells us how the owls stole Lo's children. How they killed one - Thene, the Chancellor's daughter. But what happened to the others, Isolde? What happened to all those children?

"I've thought a lot about it. I've been thinking about it constantly since we found out about the Strangers. I've not let myself drink for three weeks now because I wanted to stay clear and focused, and I think I've figured it out.

"Somewhere along the line, something mixed the bloodlines. A love spell some stray fairy tossed out, maybe. A hag's curse. A love spring, even. I'm more inclined to believe it was fairy mischief, judging from the irony of it all..."

Isolde scanned her father's eyes for some sense or clarity. To her horror, he was more sober than she'd ever seen him.

"They didn't come here to start a war, Isolde. Maybe some did - like that damned Lyta - but I think the rest of them were just...curious. They wanted to live among us. Rejoin society, maybe. Rejoin humanity. But if we had known what they were..."

"Mother would have had them all killed at the start. She would never have allowed them to stay here."

"And no one would have argued with her. Look at Lo, Isolde. Look at Festival, and at the temple. Our world - our history and culture - has been built on hatred and loathing of all things owlish. But if they were to slip in, to marry our sons and daughters, gain our trust and work at our sides..." He stopped and ran a trembling hand through his thinning hair.

"A lot of people have died. Some innocent, some not so, but no one cares enough to sort them out. I don't agree, Iffy. I don't agree at all. Your mother went too far. She was wrong to sentence them all to die."

He came around to face her, blocking the view of the smoky Agris she'd become so accustomed to in the past weeks. "I'm begging you to wake up, Iffy. You've already lost your children and if you don't get up and do something, you'll lose your husband at sunrise."

She broke then, wailing and sobbing into his shoulder. He patted her on the back, stroking her hair and shushing her as though she were still his little girl.

"I've lost everything," she said, burying her face in his neck.

He took her by the shoulders and smiled sadly, but reassuringly. "You haven't. Not yet."


	11. Chapter 11

If she had known later who was at the door, and why, Relia would never have gotten out of bed. But in her husband's line of work - Captain of the Chancellor's High Guard - she had grown accustomed to midnight callers pounding on the door, demanding that Varian get out of bed and attend to some urgent matter. She had also gotten used to his kinsmen dragging him home after some mad brawl, trailing blood and vomit behind them all the way. He had taken to sleeping in the cellar with the wine and the rats since things had gotten so bad between them (here she absently touched the bruise below her left eye), but when duty called, she always, however reluctantly, got up to answer the door.

Relia pulled her shawl around her shoulders, struggling to meet the corners, and shambled to the door. In her condition, pregnant as a tick and full as ripe to pop, walking a dozen meters was no small task. She opened the door a crack to see - to her infinite surprise - the Chancellor's daughter.

"Isolde?" She rasped, opening the door wider to allow Isolde passage into the foyer. "Isolde, what's-"

"I need your help, Relia," she said calmly. Her eyes burned with something that made Relia want to throw her out and slam the door in her face, but she was too far beyond that now. "I need you to do something for me, and I need you to keep silent about it."

"Wha-?"

"I'm going to free my husband. I'll need some of your clothes and Varian's keys to the lower cells."

Realization dawned on Relia, and she shook her head almost without realizing it. "Forget it, Isolde. Even if I could help, I wouldn't. If Varian found out, he'd kill me-"

"Varian won't find out. If he does, I'll confess that I forced it from you."

"And how did you plan on doing that?" Relia smirked, hands on her massive stomach.

It may have made her larger, but it certainly didn't make her threatening. Isolde smiled sweetly, her eyes as cold and flat as her mother's. Relia felt a momentary chill emanating from her old friend.

"I could tell Varian about your children."

Relia blinked. She had only one child, and another on the way...

Her eyes opened wide in horrified understanding.

"I know where they are, Relia. I watched you bury them. I could show Varian where their graves are. I could insist - I could even command - that he dig until he finds their tiny bones, all those unfinished little bodies." She spoke evenly, without a touch of remorse, even when she saw that Relia had begun to weep.

"Varian's a very..." she touched the bruise beneath Relia's eye, "forgiving sort of man, I'm sure."

"You can't know about that," Relia insisted. "We...I...was so careful..."

Isolde stepped forward. The cold smile melted from her lips. "I had no friends when I was a child. I had no one to play with and nothing to do but follow the rest of you around and watch from a distance. You'd be surprised at the things I learned.

"Now here's a little something you should know: If I have to watch my husband die at sunrise, I promise I'll see you buried with your children at the base of Ornithon by nightfall." Relia clutched at her stomach protectively.

Isolde pretended not to notice. Relia swore at her old 'friend,' cursing under breath. She stalked over to the cupboard and withdrew a ring of sullied brass keys, which she threw at Isolde, then disappeared into a room off the hallway. When she returned moments later, her eyes were rough and wet and she fairly stumbled beneath a pile of nondescript clothes.

"Go and bring me back a pillow," she instructed Relia.

She undressed and dressed in silence, tucking her hair back into the hood, keeping her face to the ground. She stuffed the pillow under her dress, painfully shutting out the memories of when she carried her own children.

Alba's term had kept her off her feet for months...

She forced herself to shed the thought. Through another doorway further down the hall, she seized a jug of wine and a basket of breads and fruits she found on a dining table. She dropped the keys in the basket and carried the whole thing with her. Now if anyone saw her wandering the lower levels of the dungeon, they would simply think Relia had come to deliver a late dinner to her husband.

Isolde thanked her tightly, twirling the keys. "If you speak of this to anyone, or if you betray me, your life will be worth less than an owl's."

Relia nodded her understanding, keeping her arms crossed as if to protect the life in her belly. "I hope you get yourself killed, owl lover!" she hissed, and slammed the door soundly behind her.

Isolde had never been in the dungeons, but why would she? Her world had always been a world of propriety and perfection, and neither of these things was allowed to exist down here. The walls glistened slick and moist in the torchlight, and Isolde gagged on the pungent odors of excrement and decay that hung in the air.

She heard voices - two laughing guards - and fled beyond the torchlight's reach. The keys, still hot and wet from the sweat of her palm, lay nestled snugly in the basket. Isolde touched them from time to time to make certain she still had them at hand, as though she could not quite believe in their solidity.

She turned a corner, staring into row after row of empty cells, until she came to the last cell on the right, a great wooden door with bars set into a tiny window up high. She had to stand on tiptoe, and then finally jump to catch a glimpse inside. She would have moved on, had she not seen the telltale flash of silvery hair, made filthy and dirt-dark by the dungeon squalor.

She dug for the keys and carefully lifted them to the lock, wincing as the fall of the tumblers exploded through the silent dungeon. In her ears, it sounded as loud as the blast from Cullen Marst's fire-tube. She had thought the dungeon halls were filthy, inhumane places, but this was before she had seen the inside of her husband's cell. Decaying creatures - a rat here, a lizard there - littered the stone floor.

Something that looked like a green snake half-floated, bloated and decomposing, in a rusty pan of water on the floor. The only water in this horrid place, she noted, choking back a sob. Garreth lay with his face to the wall on a pile of rotting hay that reeked of urine and ancient death. She thought first that he was dead, so thin and bony his shoulders, so pale was his skin beneath his torn clothing, and her heart sank down into her feet. She could not leave him, even dead, in a place like this...

He sighed, and Isolde's throat filled with a cry of joy. He turned over at the sound, squinting to make out this dark silhouette backlit by flickering torchlight.

"Who is it?" he rasped, his voice dry and gravelly.

He'd had nothing to wet his vocal cords for days, not since the last sip of water had bent him double and sent him retching into a corner. She shut the door slowly behind her and set the basket at his feet. He could hear hands in the dark, tearing, twisting, and he could smell the heavenly aromas of fresh bread and sweet fruit. She took his hand and pressed a grape to his lips.

"Isolde?" he croaked, and wept as her kisses quieted him in the darkness.

"Eat something. Not too quickly. Eat, then speak."

His shaking hands traveled up to her wrists, then her shoulders, and sought her face, warm and wet in the darkness. He could feel her trembling even through his own as she fed him grapes and bread and gave him small sips from the jug. At first he coughed and sputtered, but she was as persistent as she could be gentle, and soon he took a little food and drink for himself.

"Isolde, I'm sorry-"

"It's not the time for apologies," she told him. "You're to be executed at dawn. If we're to save your life, we have to leave here tonight. Now. Are you strong enough to walk?"

He rose on shaky legs and used Isolde's shoulder to steady himself. "It doesn't matter, but yes, I think so."

Quickly, she pulled the cloak around her and crouched low as shadows played beyond the door. When the danger had passed, she moved back to her husband's side. "We're leaving Lo. If we're to stay together, we have to go beyond the valley."

"We can go into the mountains," he murmured. "We'll find solace there for a while."

She said nothing. He couldn't see her expression in the darkness, but he knew she was troubled by the suggestion. "It's the safest place for us right now. Ombra is already there."

"Ombra?" she cried, and Garreth placed his hand over her mouth. "Ombra is alive? On Mount Ornithon?"

"There's little between here and Ornithon to stop him. The owls are my blood, Isolde, just as you and Ombra and Alba are." He heard the little hitch in her breath and squeezed her hand gently.

"They know their own. They would never hurt him."

"And me? What will they think of me?"

He sighed heavily and did not answer.

She thought as much. "Then there is no place for us."

"We'll find a place," he promised. "Once we're beyond the valley and in the mountains, we can take Ombra and move on. Your father told me once of a place to the north - a story I hope to be true - where fairies still swarm in clouds around the ruins of an abandoned outpost. It's enormous, Isolde - it was built as a trap for enemies of Faerie. Few who went in ever found

their way out again. They wandered around lost, stumbling and blind, until they simply died from lack of hope.

"That's where we'll make our home. We'll hide so well that anyone who dares come for us will never get out alive. We'll be safe there. We can be a family again."

"But how will we ever make it? How can Ombra survive in a place like that? He's only a child! How do we know that this place isn't just part of a story my father liked to tell when he was drunk?"

"Isolde, I cannot be what I am without some kind of magic. Ombra is a part of me, and so are you. We WILL survive." Although she couldn't see it, she knew he was smiling at her. "We have to have faith, love. Have faith in me, as I have faith in you. Have faith that this will all end well for us.

Now," he said, lifting his arm over Isolde's shoulders for support. "Let's leave this place and go find our son."

For hours he'd watched, leaning into his walker, growing tired and stooped as the night wore into dawn. Though his back ached and his muscles cramped beneath the weight of his skin, he couldn't leave. Not yet. Not until he knew. She whimpered in her sleep, drawing her arms close to her body. A tiny smile curled her lips for just a moment.

Oh, yes. The story had her completely, from eyes to fingers to toes. Awake and aware, she might have been all right, but in sleep the story could harness her senses and move her soul around on puppet strings. She couldn't just watch it unfold, as she safely could from the distance of a dream; this story demanded action and participation, sometimes at the cost of self.

But this is the nature of stories, how they find others to listen and tell them. She gave a heartbreaking sigh and shifted in her sleep, murmuring warmly under her breath.

She whispered: "Garreth."

Although she'd only said one word, his heart filled with a hope he hadn't felt in years. He chewed a ragged nail until blood welled. She didn't have just any story playing itself out inside her; she had the first story, the wellspring of them all. He could practically feel the heavy weight of the ferryman's oar easing up on his weary old arms.

She had a front row seat and true to form, it wouldn't let her go until she'd heard it all.

Isolde paid little attention to the rank stench of the dungeon as she and Garreth moved through the dim halls to their freedom. She barely felt the cold stones beneath her slippers, or felt the heat of a flickering torch as she passed so near one it singed her hair.

It didn't matter. She had only good fortunes to imagine now, with Garreth in her arms and the two of them so close to escaping. She let herself wander a little in her thoughts of freedom and family, and pictured Ombra waiting for them on Ornithon with a seldom-seen smile in his cloudy eyes.

Ombra's smiling eyes and Garreth's hopeful words dissolved into spent dreams as her mother's guards spilled into the corridor before them. Isolde shouldered Garreth up, leaning more of his weight on her, and backtracked the way they had come. Further down there might be another way. A door she'd missed before. A different corner.

A slew of red-robed guards poured into the hall all around them, spears and swords at the ready. Isolde screamed and bit as they dragged Garreth from her, lashing out at them like a wild, trapped thing. Garreth gritted his teeth and bore their blows without protest, knowing full well that any blows he returned would be answered with a sword through the back.

"That's enough."

Isolde, tangled and snarled, bristled at the sound of her mother's voice. Chancellor Tamlyn stepped through them all, moving the guards in her path with only a glance. The wildness retreated from Isolde's face, leaving her lost and bewildered.

"Mother," she gasped, her voice cracked and tense.

"I had a visitor tonight," the Chancellor told her, her voice strange and distant.

"The Captain of my High Guard came to me with a story I could barely believe. He said his wife told him that you had come to her and demanded the keys to the lower cells. She told him that you were going to free this...thing, and that she had given up the keys out of fear for her life."

Isolde said nothing, but she could feel the guards' cold stares boring into her.

"I didn't believe him," she said lowly. "I denounced him in front of his own company. 'Those are traitorous words!' I told him. 'My daughter is faithful to her people. She has but one allegiance!' I would never have believed it, until..."

"Until what?"

"Varian found that his keys were not where they should have been, and held his wife accountable. He came to me with her blood still warm on his hands."

Isolde sobbed, choking. What had Varian done to her? She prayed that Relia and her child lived. She herself would never have hurt Relia, in spite of her threats, even in spite of the snubbing she'd received at Relia's hands so many years ago. She had only wanted her cooperation tonight, not her blood. But the blood trail led back to her.

The Chancellor's eyes seethed with malice. "Why would you do this?"

Isolde blinked the hated tears from her eyes. "Garreth is innocent, Mother. He tried to save Alba-"

"Don't," the Chancellor warned, her whisper a grave rattle. "Don't you even speak his name with hers."

"He tried to save her," Isolde insisted. "You saw it, too."

"I saw the thing he became. I saw what his sister," she spat the word, "did to my Alba. He is something that should never be, and at dawn he returns to nothing."

Isolde shook her head violently, weeping, "No, no, no..."

"Take her to her room. Lock her inside," the Chancellor ordered. "It's for your own good, Isolde. When this is over, you will understand."

She smoothed her daughter's tousled hair away from her face. Isolde jerked away, repulsed by her touch. She shrieked as Chancellor Tamlyn seized her face, leaving cruel red fingerprints in her daughter's white cheeks.

"From your window," she whispered, pressing a kiss on Isolde's forehead, "you can watch him die. When he is dead, I will find you a husband, a man of Lo, a wonderful man who will never leave the ground-"

Isolde spat at her in disgust. Her eyes darted to Garreth. "I won't go. You'll have to kill me."

He shook his head and started to his feet. "No, Isolde! Do-"

A guard planted her boot in Garreth's midsection, and he crumpled in a pitiful heap.

The Chancellor's smile flickered. A hushed murmur swept through the hallway. "Don't be stupid. You don't know what you're saying. You've been bewitched by this...thing." She eyed Garreth with disdain.

"Really, Chancellor," Isolde scolded, her voice not so meek now, as sharp and ridiculing. "He hasn't put a spell on me - you've cast one on us all. Your people trusted you even after you commanded them to spill the blood of their families. They thought nothing of it when you told them to kill their children in the streets, where you could watch and enjoy it all. That's stronger magic than any Garreth has."

The guards passed nervous glances at one another. Chancellor Tamlyn would not answer Isolde's accusations. Only torch fires whispered in the hateful silence, but they offered neither consolation nor confession. "You will not speak to me like that," she warned.

"Why not? You ordered the deaths of their families - don't your people deserve an explanation? Tell me, were you afraid the owls would come for you in the night, or did seeing all those people die make you feel like you hadn't lost quite so much?"

"That's enough, Isolde! Hold your tongue, or else-"

"Or else what? What will you do? Order them to kill me? You might as well. Do it, Mother!" she howled, shaking a guard off either arm. They seized her up again, surprised at the strength in her slight frame. "Order your guards to run me through RIGHT NOW, because I would rather die with Garreth than ever see your face again!"

No one moved. No one breathed. Dark, leering faces boiled in the shadows all around them. The Chancellor stepped back, stricken, and placed her hand against her own heart, as though a wound ached there. Her face had become white as chalk. She stared, tight-lipped, at Garreth. At the creature who had turned her own daughter traitor to her people.

"So be it," she pronounced. To the guards, "Throw them back in the dungeon. Give them separate cells. She dies with him at dawn."


	12. Chapter 12

Citizens milled around the Agris hours before the sky's first lightening. Some men and women, including a few young ones barely old enough to drink, mingled cheerfully, stirred by a sudden, morbid sense of community. They patted each other on the back and congratulated themselves for purging the unclean element from their beloved Lo.

Others stood apart from the crowds, their faces stark and gray as the night's passage into morning. These were the stony faces of loss - the widows and widowers and mothers of murdered children still reeling from the emptiness in their homes and beds. These were the ones who had seen their hopes die with the last breaths of their loved ones. Their eyes confessed sickness and bone-weariness, but their mouths never would.

Her mother had kept to her word and separated them, even in the low hell of the dungeons. Isolde waited silently in her cell, appreciative of the cold that sapped the nervous fire from her skin. She didn't feel afraid of what was to come. Rather, she felt a sense of peaceful release. Ombra would be safe with his people - his kin, she corrected herself. Garreth had said so. Her mind gave thanks for that much reassurance. It had been enough for her to know that he still lived, after three painful weeks of believing him dead, slaughtered by the raiding mobs.

But Alba...and Garreth...

She quieted her burgeoning tears. She would see them again - both of them - soon.

At the first deep blue striping of dawn, two guards - her mother's personal guards, both female - came for her. She stood, greeting them with quiet dignity even as they stripped her of her gown and cloak. She shivered in the darkness as they dressed her in the garb of Lo's damned - wide strips of unbleached cloth bound round her breasts and hips.

"Your gown is heavy," one of the guards said. She brushed back her brilliant auburn hair and stuffed the dress into a sack.

"It'll burn slowly and prolong your suffering."

"So it's to be burning, then?"

Red-hair nodded.

"This way," the other one said as she wrapped another strip of cloth around Isolde's breasts, "it's quicker. Nothing between you and the fire." They said nothing more to her as they slipped ropes around her wrists and led her up into the light. She looked straight ahead until she emerged onto the Agris.

The sight of Isolde, stripped of her finery and bound in prisoner's garb, stunned her people into silence. They stared unabashedly, unable to rip their eyes away as the Chancellor's daughter allowed herself to be led up a torch-lined path in ropes and bound to the stake they all thought was for her husband.

A moment later Garreth emerged from the dungeon, but the same people who had only a moment earlier allowed Isolde to pass unmolested now pelted him with stones and sticks and rotted fruit. He didn't allow their disdain to touch him, but kept his eyes on Isolde, moving toward his wife with solemn dignity. Him, too, they bound to the stake so that he could not even look upon her face.

By now the sky had turned a lush violet, the moon still shining proudly in spite of the approaching daylight. Atop the monument to Thene, the Chancellor now raised her hands for silence. Sick to her stomach, Isolde noticed her father was nowhere to be found.

Had she murdered him, too?

"Good people," she said, for the Chancellor's voice was such that she never had to shout to be heard.

"With this final act of vengeance, we cleanse our beloved Lo forever."

Some applause, surely not as much as the Chancellor had anticipated, swept through the crowd. Isolde's fingers flapped around beneath the ropes, scrambling for Garreth's. He met her fingers, brushing them with his own. It was all he could do.

"You're a very stupid girl," he reproached, his words hot and red at the edges. "You might still live if you beg her forgiveness now. Tell her I've placed you under a spell. Tell her I drugged your food. Tell her something, Isolde! There is no need for you to die here with me!"

"She would never forgive me now," Isolde answered. "I've wounded her pride."

The Chancellor's audience shuffled restlessly. These people could smell blood not yet spilled. Some truly wanted expiation; others had only come for the gruesome entertainment; still others had come to watch Garreth's death and pretend that their loved ones' blood stained his hands, and not their own.

"Our battles began a thousand years ago, with a flight of owls and the death of a child. In the weeks past, we have seen it happen again. A single child. A grim betrayal. Overnight, Lo, our home and sanctuary from all things that would do us evil, had become a haven for what we hated most. But we fought. We persevered. We won. Our battles are not waged only against the unnatural creatures that leeched their way into our lives. Our battles are with those who would sympathize with the enemy. With those who have helped them at every step, and sought to ensure the destruction of our beautiful valley. It is to my shame that such a person should be my own daughter."

Murmurs among the crowds, sudden intakes of breath like the soft hissing of rain. She extended her arm, and the red-haired guard placed a stout torch in her hand.

"I prove myself a champion to my people with this sacrifice. No one - not even my own blood - will endanger the eternal spirit of Lo."

She hauled back and threw the torch, which landed in the pile of sticks and branches and twigs with a dry crunch. For a long time, nothing happened. Isolde closed her eyes and wept, while Garreth did his best to cover her fingers with his own. Within moments of sunrise, acrid gray smoke and small licking flames crackled up from the parched wood. Isolde watched the flames grow and leap until the smoke became too much for her, searing her nostrils and burning her eyes. She could hear Garreth gasping as the smoke rose up and around them in great billowy sails. She choked his name, slumping against the ropes, which held her fast.

"Don't be scared of the fire, Isolde," he gasped. "It will be over soon."

She breathed in smoky air. Her head felt thick and heavy, as it did when she'd had too much wine to drink. If she blacked out now, she wondered, would she feel the fire burning her through to the bone? She looked up as cool wind brushed her face, fanning the smoky pillars away. She feared that in a moment it would return, twice as dense, and then she would be truly gone.

The flames had grown higher, nearly just below her feet now, but the smoke had cleared around her and Garreth. What she saw up in the sky, through the quickly shifting billows of smoke, made the words stick in her throat.

A parliament of owls hovered over Lo, thick enough to shelter them from the dawning sky. White owls, black owls, brown and spotted...a million different owls of endless variety pumped their wings, creating strong winds that fanned the smoke away from the town center and dissipated it quickly.

Garreth hooted, screeching happily up at them, and a million deafening cries came back in answer. "They've come for us!" he cried, squeezing Isolde's hand as best he could. "They've been waiting for this, watching Lo since Ombra came to them! They've come to take us home!"

The Chancellor looked on in horror as several owls swooped low, nipping with curved beaks at the ropes that bound Garreth and Isolde. Others used their razored talons to tear at the dry fibers until the ropes lay in shreds.

"Kill them!" the Chancellor shrieked. "Kill them all! They cannot live!"

Swords drawn, the guards rushed forward.

So did the owls.

The scene on the Agris this morning mirrored the beautiful woodcuts tucked safely away in the temple libraries. Humans and owls met in this in-between place, surreal and dreamlike even as their blood mingled and flowed, locked in deadly embrace until one or both fell. The owls pecked and ripped, plucking out eyes as easily as berries from a bush. Isolde winced at the sight of one of her mother's guards dead at her feet, her tongue gone and her eyes missing from their yawning sockets. She recognized the woman only by her flaming red hair.

Garreth took his wife by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him alone. All around her, screams pierced the rising dawn, shattering the normal sleepy morning peace.

"Isolde, stay with me!" He shook her shoulders gently, keeping a cap on his own fear.

"We're going to get out of here. Take my hand and don't let go. Do you understand?"

She nodded, jumping as an owl crash-landed at her feet, one blood-soaked wing hanging sad and useless from its body. It fluttered momentarily in the dust, then uttered a last pitiful wail and went still. Isolde choked back a sob for the pitiable thing.

"Isolde!"

She looked back at the sound of her mother's voice. A congregation of owls hovered about her like a cloud of pesky mosquitoes, dipping low to get their digs in. Their calls rang out, laughter in the tumult all around.

"Isolde help me PLEASE!" Dagger-sharp talons lashed out, ripping her regal robes and scoring the skin below with vicious furrows. Her scarlet blood splattered as she waved her arms wildly, shielding herself from the attack.

"Garreth-" Isolde pleaded, resisting as he pulled her toward Mount Ornithon, where their son waited for them. "She's my mother!"

Garreth's eyes shifted uneasily from their path over to the Chancellor, who was quickly losing ground beneath the onslaught. Garreth threw back his head and screeched at her attackers, his call white and chilling. Isolde looked on in amazement as they retreated grudgingly, and moved on to another target.

The Chancellor stared at Isolde and Garreth, seeing nothing. Her headdress was gone now and Isolde could plainly see the scratches marring the white field of her forehead. Her black hair stuck out in tangled snarls.

"They won't stay away from her forever," he told Isolde, dragging her along.

"They know her too well. Don't look back again, love. You won't like what you see."

"Isolde!" she called behind them. "Isolde, wait-!"

"Goodbye, Mother," she whispered, even as the woman's screams started up again behind them. Not a single human could claim immunity - every face, every body, bore some sign of attack. Townspeople ran in blind panic, slamming into one another, waving torches with foolish abandon and setting fire to neighbor and kin.

An old woman in flaming rags stumbled around, her face contorted in pain so great no sound escaped her lips. All around similar scenes played out: an owl fluttered at the end of a pitchfork thrust into a wooden gate; hysterical children huddled together as a group of owls clustered triumphantly over their mother's weak, struggling body. A gang of white owls dug their talons into a screaming man's wrists until he dropped his sword, then held him fast as others ripped savagely at his breast and torso. One made away with his heart; another took his liver. So the owls' assault continued, brutal and methodical.

Garreth and Isolde moved through it all like travelers in a dreamworld, touching nothing, taking nothing, leaving everything. Only a few straggling bodies had been able to make it far from the Agris, where they could see the smoke and dark rings of owls, but they could no longer hear the tortured cries of the townspeople. They looked at one another, and found hope amidst the exhaustion and fear. The city gates were still some way off, but if they stayed together and did not stray from their purpose-

"You would bring the city to dust, and then leave?"

Isolde stopped abruptly, and Garreth jerked back when her arm went taut. She turned, the rattling voice still thick in her ears. Cullen Marst raised the fire-tube that had taken Lyta down with one explosive shot. He gripped the weapon tightly, his quaking, withered hands unusually steady and sure as he pointed it at Garreth's heart.

"Get behind me, Isolde!" Garreth hissed, watching Cullen's fingers move closer to the trigger.

But Isolde moved forward, raising her hands in surrender. "Cullen," she pleaded, "don't do this. Let us go."

His ancient eyes glared at Garreth before wandering wearily to Isolde.

"There was a time I'd have given everything I own to see you look at me once the way you look at him. I would have, you know. I loved you so."

"I know," she told him, though she remembered the look in his eyes as anything but tender. "I know you did."

"But you didn't want me," he went on flatly.

"And why would you want an old man? Sick, feeble...I wouldn't have been nearly as good a lover to you as your young owl, I suppose..."

"What do you want from me, Cullen? I can't change any of that now."

He blinked, surprised. Isolde cringed as he chuckled dryly. "Can't you? What did you think? That I wouldn't want you because you've been an owl's whore for all these years? No, Isolde. I'm a better man than that. I'd still have you."

Garreth snarled and made a move in the old man's direction, but Isolde grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back.

"Don't," she whispered. "You have to trust me."

She slipped around him and moved toward Cullen. She placed her hand on the tube. The metal felt warm beneath her fingers, and she caught a whiff of strong sulfur and burnt powder as she made him lower it gently, but persistently. She wondered if his last victim had been man or owl. Or, like Garreth, both.

"I will stay with you, if you swear to me that you will let him go unharmed."

"Isolde," Garreth breathed. "No-"

Cullen's shriveled eyelids blinked once, twice in surprise. Was she actually using herself to bargain for the life of that...creature?

"No games, Cullen. He's no threat to you. Let Garreth go, and I'll stay with you as your wife. In deed, if not in name," she managed.

His eyes darted back and forth between them, scouting for tricks and schemes. She could smell the distrust on him.

"You would give yourself to me in return for his freedom?"

"My love for his life," she bargained. "That's the deal."

He pondered her offer, coolly calculating his risks and gains. At last, he lowered the weapon to his side.

"Very well," he told her, and put out one gnarled, shaking hand. "I accept."

She dropped Garreth's hand.

Garreth shook his head grimly and snapped up her hand again, unwilling to let her go. The anger, the harsh betrayal in his eyes set her heart to violent palpitations.

"Just let me say goodbye to him," she told Cullen, a sad smile touching her lips.

"By all means." He held his arms wide in a sweeping gesture of welcome.

She embraced Garreth tightly, her lips against his ear. He buried his face in her neck so she could feel his hot tears against her skin. At this moment she wanted nothing more than to take his hand and run with him.

Garreth's voice held a throaty rasp. "Isolde, please don't-"

"I'll only slow you down," she whispered, her arms tightening around him.

"You can make it to Ornithon faster on wings than on foot. Find our son. Tell him his Mama loves him, and that I'll be along as soon as I can get away from here-"

"No," came Cullen's voice from close behind her. Too close not to have heard her whispering. "You won't."

The shot crossed near her ear, throwing her aside in a blast of white-hot pain. Her head vibrated with the sound of sirens, the ominous ringing sound that continued even after her life had exploded into a million fragments. She looked down, expecting to see a river of blood soaking the fabric that wrapped her body. But no...she felt nothing, save the persistent buzzing in her ear, like a wasps' nest on fire. The whole side of her face felt wet, hot and angry, and searing with powder burns.

But Garreth...

She screamed until her throat felt raw and mangled. Cullen had fired that hateful weapon while her back was turned, and there had been nothing she could do to stop him. Garreth lay on the ground now, the look of alarm as Cullen raised his weapon frozen in his eyes forever. She dropped to her knees beside him, her thoughts flashing quick and disorganized as an amateur sideshow.

His hair was a filthy nest of blood and bone. Trembling, she reached down to smooth a lock of crimson-stained flax from his eyes. She tended him with preternatural calm, as though she were elsewhere reading their story in a book or watching it performed on stage.

Anywhere but here, anytime but now, anything but this.

"What do you think of your owl lover now, my dear?" Cullen asked, preparing his weapon for a final shot.

She saw Cullen speaking - she knew he had opened his mouth and spoken to her - but she did not understand his words for the buzzing in her head. She could not hear how he laughed, how his last words mocked her, taunted her, and assumed that of the two of them, she was the one who had lost everything. But over the awful thrumming in her head, she could hear their approach. She felt their wingbeats fanning the side of her face, brushing and comforting with their soft, gentle wings. They scooped low, surrounding them - Cullen, Isolde, Garreth - until the sky was a dome made of owls.

Cullen shrieked, his palsied claws stuttering over the metal. He extended his weapon, dropped it, raised it, and aimed. But where do you aim when death surrounds you on all sides? He shifted with a cry as something dipped, nipped at the sagging flesh at his neck, and took wing again. He swung the fire-tube around as another swooped down and left him with a welling gash across his forehead.

Isolde saw none of this. She saw only the small white owl, so brilliant and crystal-clear, like a single perfect note amidst the noise in her head. It arced gracefully and came to hover curiously before her, its eyes blue and gold and oddly knowing...

His feathered body shifted and he stretched his wings, the pinfeathers shimmering opalescent even in the shadows of the owl-dome. Look, he seemed to say. Look what I've become!

"Ombra," she whispered, and he lit carefully upon her shoulder, caressing her bloody cheek tenderly with his wing. Could it be? Ombra, her dark and silent child, grown light and radiant in his becoming?

She stretched her arm out, and her sweet boy hopped along its smooth white length, oh-so-careful not to scratch her with his talons. He spread his wings on the end of her fingers, as if he wanted to take her hand and fly her away.

His message was clear enough: Time to go.

But not time enough.

That wicked, deafening clap of gun-thunder again, and Isolde's body jerked. The shot hit like a thousand sharp stones crashing into her at once, and then a terrible, heavy frost overtook her. A sticky web of cold spread slow and thick through her limbs, numbing her senses and carrying her farther and farther from consciousness.

Behind her, Cullen Marst stood hand-over-mouth, the fire-tube still smoking in his grip. All around the owls had gone silent and stony, the beating of their wings an audible pulse in the shadowy dome. Ombra's heartbroken cry shattered the mantra as Isolde slumped to the ground.

As soon as he landed beside her, his snowy wings dissolved to childish flesh. He knelt over her, tears streaking the dust on his face, sobbing and crying "Mama!" as though his heart broke again and again. A gray owl, stately and ancient, dropped to Ombra's shaking shoulder and nipped softly, consolingly, at his ear.

The other owls, however, moved in a wave, closing around Cullen as a dark hand extinguishes a candle's flame. He swatted and swore, waving his arms like a madman though not a single one descended upon him. They watched him, their eyes flashing silver, glinting hurricanes as he raved, lunatic.

"Kill me!" he challenged, throwing the fire-tube down. "What are you waiting for?"

But still, no one moved.

Ombra wiped his arm across his nose, sniffling and snubbing as he stood and faced Cullen Marst. The elder owl passed Cullen a gleeful look before rejoining his kin in formation.

"They're not going to kill you."

Cullen, wide-eyed and ranting, looked down at the boy. He thought - just for a moment - he actually heard the taint of amusement in his voice!

"They aren't? Why not? What do you know? Speak to me, boy!"

He reached for Ombra, and the chilling shrieks of a million owls sliced through the air. Cullen clapped his hands to his ears and shrank back, suitably chastised.

"They say you don't deserve to die." Ombra's exhausted, frightened eyes skated over the old man's thunderstruck face.

"They say you deserve to live a long, long time and never forget what you've done."

The sound of wingbeats grew louder and more persistent until it melted into a single, sustained chant. He felt a sickening pull in his chest and dropped to one knee, fighting the unseen thing that worked to yank out his soul. Gasping, he gave a final wrench and tumbled into the dirt.

In a moment it was done. He looked no different, except perhaps a little darker around the eyes. But as most Strangers would have told you, externals rarely mattered. It was what you carried inside that really made you who you were.

As for Cullen, the space between his ribs and spine had become a great yawning void, silent and cavernous. He could no longer hear the blood pounding in his ears, adding percussion to the owls' ceaseless chanting. The pulse of life in his fingertips and chest had suddenly, horribly ceased.

And yet he lived. He lived.

"What have they done to me?" he whispered, his voice a shaky rattle.

"You don't deserve to die," he told him. "But you don't deserve to live, either. Now you'll just...go on."

Ombra turned from him for the last time. His small shoulders slumped, listless with shock and apathy. The change seemed a long time in coming, but eventually his soft boyskin shrank and ripened with bumpy flesh, springing up a crop of silky white feathers. He felt renewed as he left the heavy burden of flesh behind and took to the sky with his new family, heedless of the old man's hollow cries below.

Cullen watched pillars of thick black smoke rise from the distance, professing the end of Lo's history in a last foul breath. He closed his eyes and felt hot wind blow through him. His body felt transparent, filmy as sheer lace. He covered his face with twisted hands, tasting only dust and death and...

The quiet, gentle flavor of violets.

He spat, and the taste came back twice as strong, twice as potent. It filled his head, his nose, until it filled all of him and misted the world a pale, smoky purple. Not purple. Violet.

"What is this?" he demanded, his face screwed up in disgust. "What have you done to me!?!"

No answer came.

But something else did.

Something invited itself in and took up a seat in the back of his head, something persistent and lasting that left the sweet violet taste on his tongue just a touch bitter. It settled in, snug and comfy in that place where all our worst fears and darkest secrets collect to haunt us in the quiet moments before sleep. It settled down, spread its wings, and began to whisper.


	13. Chapter 13

Eddie Pagano twirled his nightstick as he made the rounds, humming "Goodnight Irene" under his breath. He was thinking the usual thoughts - usual, that is, for Eddie Pagano. He had another grandchild on the way (his third!) and his wife Dory had just retired from her secretarial position after thirty-eight years of pushing pencils. He thought about retirement, and about the races he could enter and the bike trails still slick with morning dew that would be waiting for him two weeks from today. He'd taken great care of himself - at seventy, he felt stronger and fitter than most men in their twenties.

Now he was down to just two weeks on this job - two weeks until he had a pension and all the free time in the world to chase Dory and pretend he was nineteen again. Maybe not every day, but he could certainly see surprising her once or twice a week with a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers.

Daisies, he reminded himself. She loves daisies. With just two weeks to go until retirement, Eddie planned to take the job easy. Not lightly...just easy. He wouldn't let any of the guys rib him about spending so much time in the bathroom, or let that snotnosed little Jason call him "Old Man" and egg him on. Hell, he wouldn't even gripe about Butch forcing the bolts out of the toilet seat whenever he dropped his massive bulk down on the pot.

Easy.

But easy didn't include putting up with homeless kids playing house in the galleries. Anna's eyes snapped open as the guards' footsteps rounded the corner.

"Hey!" he shouted, striding towards her with his stick raised. He hadn't expected the terrified look in her eyes, nor had he expected her to scream the way she did. He wasn't a large man, and certainly not imposing. But then, he decided as he put the stick away, if I woke up to see somebody coming at me with a nightstick, I'd probably pee my pants too.

"Hey kid," he said, softer. "Come on, kid. Get up. You can't stay here."

She looked around, barely recognizing the dusty gallery. The lights had come on again, but it didn't look as she had remembered it. It seemed...different. Smaller, somehow, as though she'd just returned to her little room after seeing the entire world stretched out before her.

Above her, Isolde's smooth white arms beckoned to the floating owl.

"I thought you were lovers," she whispered to Isolde, talking through the lump in her throat. "I didn't know you were his mother..."

Great, Eddie thought. Friggin' basket case. She was clean, though, and her clothes looked nice and new. Didn't strike him as the homeless variety at all.

"Time to go, kid," he said again, taking her by the arm. Her eyes unfocused, grew wild and skittered across the floor, the walls, the strange salt-and-pepper-haired man in the blue uniform who hoisted her to her feet. "Where am I?"

"You're in the Crestfall Gallery. Looks like you fell asleep here. You need to go home, your parents are probably worried sick..."

She wasn't listening to him anymore. Her eyes had fallen on a walker dropped willy-nilly on the floor beyond the statue's base - and a pair of expensive, shiny shoes. The kind that made no sound at all when they crept up behind you. But these shoes weren't empty. Thin ankles sprouted sideways from them and grew into legs that disappeared behind the thick white pedestal.

Eddie waved his hand in front of her face and followed the line of her vision with his eyes. His face paled three shades when he spotted the body of the old man, slack and lifeless.

Jeez, was the guy smiling?

Eddie cursed loudly. "You stand right outside this door!" he barked at her.

"Don't you go ANYWHERE!"

Anna paid him no attention and wandered off, struggling through twisting and turning walls, through rooms that connected and wound in circles, never recognizing a single panel or work. One of the guards caught her drifting, lost in the meandering galleries, and brought her back to the security office, where the police waited with her purse (found on the gallery floor) and a long list of questions she couldn't possibly answer.

"Listen to this, Anna." Mom rattled the paper across the table and cleared her throat.

"'Collin Masters, reclusive local sculptor, philanthropist, and patron of the arts, passed away early Saturday morning after a sudden heart attack...'"

Anna, knee-deep in another story, erased the last line she had written.

"Philanthropist?"

"That's what it says. Apparently he had a great deal of money and gave lots of it to..." she scanned the obituary until she found the passage,

"the Aria Foundation on Aging and the National Institute of Sleep Research." Mom shrugged.

"Maybe he had interests in both of them."

"Maybe he did," she agreed, careful to keep her icy smile to herself. Not that either of his pet projects had been able to cure his ills, but maybe someone else's life was made better for it.

"There's a picture of him. The guy looks ancient. Want to see it?"

She really didn't, but she nodded in spite of herself. Mom turned the paper around and Anna's breath caught in her chest.

Someone had taken this picture of him unawares, perhaps catching him in a moment of quiet reflection. His eyes looked dark and sunken, the mouth a straight line set deep in his face. He wore a flannel shirt and chewed thoughtfully on a pipe, a book spread open across his lap as he sat on the edge of the porch railing.

To a casual observer, Collin Masters might be simply have been a mild-faced old man. They could never know at a glance how horrible his crimes, how lasting the penance.

"He looks like someone's grandpa," Mom said.

"Shame he had to go like that, and senile to boot. All that crazy talk about stories and hearing voices..."

She picked Abel up to feed him and Alex howled, none too thrilled to be left alone in the carrier. Anna swept Alex up before he could get too loud, murmuring softly to him as she traced his tiny tulip lips with a finger. He puckered reflexively and kicked his tiny arms and legs in protest. She tickled the baby's fingers, laughing as he unclenched his fist and grasped her index finger in his itty-bitty hand.

"Nestling," she whispered, and kissed his smooth, unblemished forehead.

Anna's mom shook her head in amazement. Ever since Mom and Dad brought Anna home from the police station Saturday, she'd been a completely different person. Scattered and subdued at first, as though she couldn't quite put names to faces, but that seemed understandable enough, considering the shock she'd been through.

Imagine, falling asleep only to wake up near some poor old man who'd died in the night...

But the Anna that had come home with her, the Anna who did the dishes without being asked and volunteered for babysitting duty without demanding money...this barely felt like the same person. Mom's Anna was the moping, brooding teenager who never wanted to look at the babies, so much as touch one of them. The Anna who might sooner stick one of them with a diaper pin or make the formula just a little too hot had - dare she say it? -

thankfully gone underground for the time being.

Mom, practical lady that she was, had the sneaking suspicion that the easiest way to lose a miracle was to question it. So she didn't.

"You okay?" she asked Anna instead. "I know you're probably sick of me checking. It's been a tough time for you-"

Anna smiled at her - another oddity that would take some getting used to.

"Mom, I'm fine. Really. I was a little spacey when I got back, but I'm better now. I'd rather not talk about it, okay?"

Mom raised her hand in surrender and passed Anna a fresh bottle of formula.

"Fair enough." She gestured to the notebook on the table, covered with tiny rubber eraser snakelings, the residue of her mistakes.

"You're filling up another one? That's three this week! What are you writing about in there?"

Anna shrugged, giving away less than nothing. "Oh...just some stories. Some things I don't want to forget."

Between groceries, shopping for tiny matching outfits for the twins, and a visit to the grandparents, it had been a tiring day for all of them. Anna made dinner and helped feed the babies, then put Alex and Abel down while her parents disappeared for a few hours of 'quality time.' Possibly a movie, possibly a little parking down by the lake (which, Anna reminded them briskly, had gotten them into this position in the first place). They laughed as she kissed them both goodbye, throwing in a hug for good measure before padding down the hall to her room.

Safe behind the door, she shed the denim and cotton that now felt so heavy against her skin. Naked, she opened the window and let the moonlight pour in, flooding her curves and shadows with elegant silver frost. The wind

breathed with her tonight, and she tilted her head in wordless pleasure as the sheer lace curtains billowed against her skin, tossed in the breeze.

She smiled at the moon, and the stars winked back. The scent of violets floated in the midnight air, punctuating the sweet whispers rustling about in her head. She thought of Alex and Abel, so tiny and faultless and pure. How could she have been such a miserable person with such beautiful creatures in her life? How could she not have appreciated parents who loved her and worried about her even when she did stupid things?

Stupid didn't even begin to describe what she must have been like before.

Selfish seemed like a good start, though. From what she'd been able to glean from her past diaries - pages and pages of whining, me-me-me drivel - anyone would've been hard pressed to pick out the child when given the choice between Alex, Abel, and Anna.

Her memories before the story came trickling back in rivulets, like an eyedropper occasionally dripping tiny drops of color into a bowl of water.

Eventually, she would remember it all, but for now she felt better about how little she could recall of herself before that night in the gallery. She'd lost a lot of memories in that one night, but hadn't it been worth everything she'd gained, and more? She'd come to know Mom, Dad, Alex and Abel better than before Cullen's death. That alone was worth a thousand stories.

She thought of Cullen stretched out on the floor of the gallery, and wondered what he would think of her now. How long had he been waiting for someone to come along, some poor soul who might never know what she was getting into? He had certainly imagined that he was pawning off his curse, trading one long death for another and exacting one last act of vengeance in the process.

What had he felt in those last moments, knowing the bane of his existence - the hated curse that animated his bones and kept him ancient and miserable forever - had passed into welcoming arms?

She donned the stories like a mantle, proud and glowing. They couldn't wear her out the way they had wasted Cullen, leeching his sanity with their eternal accusations. Unlike Cullen, she had done nothing to earn their spite. He had deserved every moment of torment and every haunted, sleepless night, while she...

She loved them. She would never let them go, not until she wore her fingers down to little nubs trying to capture them all on paper. They lived in her, through her, now, and the stories would go on so long as she had breath and voice and hands to write. As Mom had noted earlier this morning, she had quite a little collection started already.

Sometimes Isolde's whispers filled her head, describing what life was like in Lo in perfect, heartrending detail. She listened well when Isolde taught her the songs all mothers of Lo taught their children, little verses of sweet, rhyming nonsense. Anna learned them by heart and sang the twins to sleep with the pale, distant voice of memory. Before long, she could describe the smell of violets on a summer's night, the view from Isolde's room, the rolling valley and imposing rise of Mount Ornithon in the distance, better even than Isolde herself.

Garreth, too, whispered to her of life among the people of Lo, of his first vision of Isolde and how she'd captured his heart so completely. He whispered of Mount Ornithon, of decadent night flights, and soaring so high he could see his shadow on the clouds below. He told her of his children, their innocence and perfection, and his everlasting guilt at losing one of them so soon.

But when she asked, he would not speak of Ombra.

"Ombra has his own stories," he told her, his voice like rushing cavern winds.

"He carries them with him, and may tell you some if ever you meet."

"If ever we meet," she sighed, and shivered in the darkness, her body erupting in sheets of gooseflesh as the wind picked up. She wrapped her arms around herself, wishing her own beautiful Stranger would appear beneath the window, smiling as though he had already seen and approved their happy ending.

There is great power in wishing.

His dark, misty form coalesced on the lawn below and stared up at her with ageless longing. His hair had grown winter-pale and wore the dusty patina of age, though his face remained smooth and unlined. His eyes, sapphire and topaz, glittered eternal in the moonlight as his lips turned up in a rare and cherished smile. The whispers in her head had grown louder, shutting out the distant sounds of traffic and thunder.

"Please don't go!" she begged him, racking her brain for some words to make him stay. "Please. I have so many stories to tell you!"

Ombra raised his hand and blew her a silent kiss before melting back into the comfort of his feathered, pearl-perfect form. She only took her eyes from him when he disappeared beyond the treetops and dissolved into moonmist. She wiped starlit tears from her eyes, sobbing softly in the darkness, and closed the window. Forlorn, she slipped into bed, shivering between the cold comfort of cotton sheets.

She wanted - no, needed - the stories to take over for a while. They were always present now, whispering constantly in the darkest parts of her self. She heard them best in those empty minutes before sleep, which fit neither into waking nor dreaming.

"Tell me a story," she pleaded, and closed her eyes.

But no story came.

Frustrated with the sudden silence in her head, she made up her own. She invented the story of his life as it might have been. How he stayed a while with his owl-kin, learning the graces and harsh truths of avian existence.

Perhaps the time came that he headed north, seeking the Faerie outpost where his father had so wanted to hide them all away.

It would have been a good life for a child of Ombra's mixed heritage; a creature of magic in a place swimming with strange enchantments and ripening mysteries. In time he might have become its lord or even its king, giving his orders from a throne of horn and silk, and assuming a name more befitting his station.

Garreth, she whispered. Now that's a powerful name.

But now Isolde's voice intercepted her thoughts, washing over her like warm, sweet-scented waters.

"He'll come back to you in his own time," she assured her. "When he is ready to tell his tale."

She snuggled down as a symphony of whispering voices wrapped around her, catlike and misty, lulling her to sleep. Ombra would turn up again, just like a favorite story. And stories, as everyone knows, never disappear. They just go on, passing from hand to hand in the most unexpected ways, like the ferryman's oar in that old story about the young woman on a quest to find the devil. You don't ask for them.

When the time is right, they are given, and you accept them without question.

He would come back. Isolde said so, and she had to have faith in that.

Still, she lay awake a long time in her lonely little bed, listening for the click of talons against the windowpane, now and again lifting an eyelid to watch for the fleeting shadow of wings.


End file.
